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Design Objectives

The following guidelines are best practices that will help to create a site that is user-friendly, search-engine friendly and easy-to-maintain

Simplicity

• Keep pages focused, clean and simple
• Use ample margin and whitespace to make content easy to read
• Use subheads and bullet points to make the content “scannable”
• Use semantic markup to describe the relevance of content. Use of header tags communicate relevance of content not only to readers but search engine robots as well.

Relevance

• Keep content well-maintained. Each department, center and unit is responsible for their own content
• Develop content that your customers can use
• Make it easy for customers to access related information or take action on the content if applicable. Remember: every page can be a landing page so be sure to give customers the ability to act on the information on each page.
• Relevance is THE criteria that search engines like Google use to rank your pages.

Light-weight

• Keep file size to a minimum
• Minimize database connectivity
• Use Cascading Style Sheets for layout to separate content from presentation
• Avoid the use of tables for layout. Use them only for tabular data.