Purpose of Website Standards for Look and Feel

As part of the Village Template, we encourage Villages to develop a plan and standards for the “look and feel” of your website.  This should be done when you first set up your Village web and for any subsequent web redesign.  “Look and feel” includes the template used, menus and page-to-page navigation, standard page layouts, fonts used (type, color, size), how widgets are set up, word choice and spelling, pictures used and captioning, etc.

Preparing something similar to the document Website Look and Feel Standards which shows the Village Template’s “web standards for look and feel” will help Villages develop effective and appealing websites. 

If your Village has begun with this Template Village as a starting point, many of the decisions about "Look and Feel" have already been made.  You can change the default fonts and colors here.

Set standards centrally.  Rather than set font sizes and colors on each web page, enter your content as pure text and allow standardized "syles" to determine which font sizes and colors should be used.  This will give a uniform look and feel to your site and allow you to quickly change the site's look and feel.

RMV’s Website Look & Feel Start Page  allows you to set the format used for all web pages which do not explicitly override them..

Why do this?

o Consistency helps makes the site both more visually appealing and easier to use

o Having standards may also speed the development of your website by “getting it right the first time” and eliminating rework. 

o The process of making design choices early forces the Village to think through objectives, make initial decisions, and get approvals or consensus before final decisions are made.  (Hint: in one of our Villages, the development team choose orange as a key color for the website and developed the site accordingly.  When they showed the first pages to the Village President, her response “I hate orange.” Changes needed.)

How to use the Website Look and Feel Standards document

o For this document, we’ve collected examples of standards use by Villages.  

o These are examples of the types of information that you might choose to go into your Village’s “standards.”  We occasionally make specific recommendations; we include these as “hints” in green italics 

o No Village will use all that we’ve shown; most Villages will use only a fairly small subset.  In short, take what you want to use and ignore the rest.  

o In a few cases, because we wanted to show as many different types of examples as we could, the document does not exactly correspond to the standards we’ve used in the actual Village Template website. 

o We encourage you to use this to guide your thinking and help you make decisions that work best for your Village.

Suggestions Welcome

If you have suggestions for improving this, please let us know at RMVusers@vtvnetwork.org