• Background
• CLASS Project
• CLASS Staff
• General Insights
• Questions & Considerations
• Content
• Development Teams
• Content Acquisition
• Assessment & Grading
• Design
• Introduction
• Modeling
• Presentation
• Interactivity
• Navigation
• Assessments
• National Standards
• Quality Assurance
• Courses
• Features
• Courses
• Copyrights
• Technology
• Building a Course
• See and Say
• There are Limits!
• Influence and Change
• CLASS Courses
• Content
• Extras Designed
• Extras Linked
• Class Assessments
• A Bit of Dreamweaver
• Proofing
• Graphics
• MOUs
• Detailing Treatment
• Course Credits
• CLASS Style
• Publications

Page Layout

A clean, uncluttered look is always desired for any on-line course; however, the style and layout varies with each course according to the complexity of its graphic versus text elements and the people in charge of design. Working on a development team will quickly prove that everyone has his or her own idea of a “good-looking” course. The goal is to accomplish learning with as aesthetically pleasing a product as possible. While bold colors and flashy designs are great for advertisements, they can get old when considering that there may be several hundred pages of a course to go through!

Page length and the need for scrolling versus next buttons are considerations that also vary according to personal preference. Most designers have their own idea of a perfect page length. CLASS™ discovered through trial and error that too much scrolling detracts from the content.

Font type and size are important not only for easy readability, but also for consistency of look across different platforms and computers. Standard fonts, such as Helvetica or Times are best. Twelve point size is easy to read. Fancy or odd-sized fonts used in headers could be made in a graphics program to make sure they look the same on all machines and through all browsers. Use of background color and/or texture should be carefully considered. Most of the time, a white or very light beige background with black font provides the most readable page. While color and texture may be appealing on a Web site, they can become very tiring when you are reading page after page in an online course.

Courses with quite a bit of text can be laid out fairly easily on a page. Keep line length short for easy reading. The page width should be so students never need to scroll sideways to read the text. Page length should also be controlled so that students don’t have to scroll down too much, no more than two pages before going to the next page. Graphics should always be placed near the text that describes them.

Language courses typically have little text, but lots of examples and interactive aspects. They require careful page layout in order not to look cluttered.

The text in math courses needs to be broken up by many examples and interactive elements.

Courses that become too “busy” tend to feel confusing and frustrating to students. This happens when there is too much information crammed on a page. Non-occupied space (white space) isn’t always a waste!

Overuse of graphic elements and color can overwhelm the content material. Background colors and, especially, textures are probably best avoided in a course unless they are very muted.

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