Lesson 17. Designing for the Real World

In previous lessons, you learned about what you should and shouldn't do when you plan your website and design your pages. You also learned about what makes a good or bad website. There's another important factor that you should take into consideration, and that's how to design your pages for the real world.

You've already learned that the real world consists of many different users with many different computer systems who use many different browsers. Some of the things we haven't yet addressed, however, are the many different preferences and experience levels that the visitors to your site will have. By anticipating these real-world needs, you can better judge how you should design your pages. I'll also explain how you can make sure that your websites are usable people who are disabled and must use accessibility technologies to browse the Web.

In this Lesson

In today's lesson, you'll learn some ways that you can anticipate these needs, as well as the following:

• Things to consider when you're trying to determine the preferences of your audience

• Various ways of helping users find their way around your site

• HTML code that displays the same web page in each of the XHTML 1.0 specifications (Transitional, Frameset, and Strict)

• What accessibility is, and how to design accessible sites

• Using an accessibility validator