Web Design vs Print Design - Part II

In my previous post, I've talked about some of the print media and how do their designs function in conveying the meaning of the content to the audiences. In this post, I'll be discussing about web design. The internet has become an alternative tool to obtain information in today's world. Blogs, Youtube and other websites can provide more information compared to conventional media because the limitation on the internet is still very little. People get to know things happening in the other side of the globe on real time or get excess on overseas' media just by a single click. However, to create a successful website, not just the content, but it's design must also be taken into consideration.

Jakob Nielson, a web usability consultant, listed out three main guidelines for writing for the web.

• Be succinct: write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication


• Write for scannability: don't require users to read long continuous blocks of text


• Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages

He mentioned that readers read 25% slower online then on papers. Therefore, Diane Reep (2006) said, readers only 'scan' websites and they hardly read every single line and they only seek the information they want on the website. Articles in the web should also be written in inverted pyramid form, where the first few lines should already be enough to describe the gist of the whole article. If there is an elaboration, designers can create hyperlinks or hypertexts to split the information. Readers do not like to score up and down, left and right while they are reading. Hypertext will help in making the website more organize and reader-friendly.

When creating a website, a designer must understand that the readers will not read word by word but only scan through the web page in a 'F' shaped patent. Jakob Nielsen did a study that shows readers only read the first two lines in web page articles and then move vertically down through the rest of the article.


Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Web Design

Web page usually are design with headings, side column, main column. As I mentioned above, scannability is very important to a web page because readers do not like stare at the computer screen to read lengthy article for a long time. The partitions are to provide a multi reading path to readers while reading the web page. Kress G. and van Leeuwen T. said, in analyzing multimodal texts such as websites, they offers the reader a choice of reading path and, even more so than in the case of texts where a plausible reading can be discerned, leave it up to the reader how to traverse the textual space (Krees G & van Leeuwen T, 2006).


Source: http://thestar.com.my/

Above is an example of a good web design. The name of the website is visible enough on the upper left of the page. It has columns dividing the page into several parts. Readers can choose either to read the headline story first or other content such as the photo on the right of the page. The writing on the page are all succinct, therefore it is easier for the reader to focus on the text. There is also hypertext links to each and every news publish on the page, so that readers who are interested to read more can continue reading the whole report of the news.

Source: http://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm

Above is a website with bad design and you can see obviously, comparing this website with the one from web page, the lower one is not effective in conveying messages to the readers. The design of the website has no column and does not follow the F shaped patent of designing. There is no hypertext link for further information and no interaction at all.

Print design and web design basically share some similarity in designing especially multimodal documents such as a magazine and a website. The differences are the writing style and the hypertext link. All these aspect must be consider in order to create a functional and effective website.