Consider web-design factors

Moodle does quite a lot of this for you, but it's still good to review how it will work.

A web-designer generally describes students':

1. generational habits and preferences
2. content preferences
3. preferred kinds of interactivity, and
4. cultural habits

About themes

Online courses need to be consistently themed, especially when they comprise a range of disparate resources. The style sheets and general layout policies are the obvious starting points.

If using lots of video, it could follow some principles of a TV news presentation:

1. The anchor is the personal face of the whole program, so that people associate it with a real person whom they can like.
2. The anchor ties all the individual news items together, even though they don't actually present much of the news. Most reporting is done by correspondents and field reporters.
3. The studio is the same every time to reinforce the brand and present a familiar environment to viewers.

It would be ideal if each student could see his/her tutor as the presenter, but it wouldn't be viable to produce full videos of every tutor. Any one course could have a whole team of tutors.

Plan your screen appearance

If your screen looks good, your students will take you seriously, even though they mightn't consciously notice the design. If it doesn't look good, people who are used to good websites will turn off quickly.

You should divide the content into chunks (separate facts, with any supporting information.) Many programmers like to have one chunk per screen. The academic level determines how sophisticated a chunk can be; you often need to break things up more at the lower levels.

Design your home page. I prefer the kind of home page that gives instant access to everything. A fancy start-up animation might look nice the first time, but I'd rather cut to the chase.

If you're using Moodle, it already provides most of the screen layout. But you still need to ask how you can use its features to give the most attractive appearance.

If you're not using Moodle, familiarize yourself with interoperability requirements. Your material needs to work across different kinds of browsers and monitors.

Design your screen appearance:

• It should be clear and simple
• Use white space (usually)
• Carefully craft it to suit your purpose.
• Give a consistent appearance and feel all the way through (e.g. colour system, screen layout, kind of graphics, use of logo)
• Make the links work in the same way all through.
• Have a clear, simple layout with no confusing clutter or distraction.
• Make a decision on how you will use branding.
• Write your CSS.

Design your link and file structures

Make things easy to find. If possible, have no more than three click-throughs from the home-page to any file. Drop-down "sucker fish" Java Script menus reduce the number of click-throughs, if you can use them.

Design your file structure. Using folders will keep things where you can find them, and a consistent system of file names will mean that you'll still be able to use find files even if your site grows to  thousands of files.

Write clean, fast code with no glitches. (e.g. no bad links)