Design

This article does not aimed at giving what is a good design, but tries to enumerate elements of it that are eventually found on each website. This is kind of a checklist for the designer.

“Must Have” Elements

  • Menu
  • Breadcrumb menu (“you are here:”)
  • Page title
  • Content
  • Last modification

Other Ideas

  • Language selection
  • Webmaster's email
  • Page-integrated search engine
  • Link to sitemap
  • Link to contact page
  • Social bookmarking
  • Imprint
  • Legal information
  • Data protection

Being TemplaVoilà!-Ready

Do not forget to ask the designer to set an ID to each HTML-element that should be used to incorporate dynamic content. This will greatly simplify the mapping process.

Example:

<!DOCTYPE html
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <!-- stripped -->
</head>
<body>
  <!-- header ... -->
 
  <div id="title">Lorem Ipsum</div>
  <div id="content">
    <p>Vivamus eget arcu. Praesent scelerisque diam vel sem.
        Integer rhoncus</p>
  </div>
 
  <!-- stripped -->
 
  Last modified: <span id="last_update">01.01.1970</span>
</body>
</html>