Obliquity's Seven Rules of Good Web Site Design

We emphasise clarity and easy navigation in our web pages. We have taken great pains to avoid the latest trendy nonsense such as frames, graphics-intensive pages and tricks that only work with one type of browser, in order to produce documents that are accessible to everyone.

This isn't always easy. The traditional publisher has complete control over the final appearance of the printed page. The web publisher, on the other hand, has to learn to let go of this fine control and design something that will get the information across in a readable fashion no matter what computer and browser is used to view the pages. We have put considerable effort into learning about unusual browsers, such as those used by disabled or visually-impaired people, in an attempt to make all of our pages available to the widest possible audience.

We also believe that we have a duty to you, our visitors, to make it easy to find the information that you want. That is why we provide full and clear Table of Contents pages for each of our main subject headings and navigation links within each subject. In addition, every page contains "invisible" information about its content, to ensure that our pages are listed prominently and accurately by all of the major search engines.

The Seven Rules

The information on every page should be accurate, relevant, up-to-date and clearly presented.
The pages should be visually appealing and have a strong sense of corporate identity.
The web site should be easy to navigate, allowing users to quickly find the information that they want.
The pages should be accessible to everyone, not just to owners of the very latest version of Netscape or Internet Explorer.
The pages should be quick to load. At Obliquity, 99% of the pages are smaller than 10 kilobytes, so they will load in about 3 or 4 seconds on a typical (28kbits/s) modem.
The web site should not rely on imagemaps, frames, animated images, cookies and JavaScript.
Every page should contain keywords and a description to enable search engines to deduce its content, and therefore to list the page prominently and accurately in response to a query.