A good place to start when designing a l ayout is a piece of paper. You can sketch out several different layouts and choose one you thing would work best for site. You are going to want to make your site as readable as possible without cramming content, overloading a page, or having to much empty space. For the average person searching the web, and they see your website, you have under 30 seconds to prove to them that your site is worth visiting or purchasing from. Office Live only offers 5 different types of layouts, Single Area (which this website uses), two side by side, 3 side by side, 3 span bottom, and 3 span top. In most cases these layouts should be adequate. But if you need more advanced layouts, you can use tables to arrange your information. How much text? This will of course depends on your site, but generally a 300+ words per page is considered about right. This will give the search engines enough content to index, while not killing off your viewers. Resolutions and screen sizes vary widely! As such it is important to remember not everyone has as big or as small a monitor as you, if possible design your site in a 1024x768 environment, this is the most common and will give a general idea what most people will see. As far as width and height is concerned, having a horizontal scroll bar is a BIG no, no. With Office Live you can select a site width of either 780px or 100%. With 780px, your site will be locked to 780px wide, though content can force your site to be wider than 780px. With 100% your site will stretched or shrunk to fit into the viewers browser, again, your content can cause your site not to shrink and give the viewer a horizontal scroll bar. As for heigh (vertical) generally it is best not make the viewer have to scroll more than twice, that is if the viewer is using a standard resolution of 1024x768, the site should not be longer than 1500 pixels. Final thing for layout is navigation. Office Live 3 choices for navigation top, top and left, and left, the best choice will depend on how much content you are going have on the navigation. Less content, top; more content, left; using top and left in office live seem to just waste space on the left side, especially if you don't have any child pages. |