This style guide presents conventions to use when creating and formatting Vital Signs Case Study web pages. You should follow this guide closely if you submit a case study to the Vital Signs Project for possible inclusion in our Case Study Library. (See Publishing A Case Study for more information.) If you do not plan to submit your study to Vital Signs, and instead will post it on your own home page or school's Vital Signs site, consider this guide a good starting place for considering how you'll format your study. And of course, feel free to use this style verbatim if you wish.

We at Vital Signs compiled this guide by pooling our collected knowledge about writing for and using the web. This knowledge was often hard-won, and is based on over a year’s worth of full-time experience with the Vital Signs web site and the web in general. We believe that web pages created following this guide embody good graphic design based on simple layout and visual clarity. But, applying these style conventions alone will not make good web pages. Ultimately, web pages that are easy to use and comprehend depend on clear, well thought out, and organized content equally with, if not more than, good design.

This guide is prescriptive. It tells you exactly how many line breaks to put between the 5-point horizontal rule at the end of the header and the first 240-pixel-wide image in the body. We recognize, however, that individual judgment must be the final guide when designing web pages because what works in one situation may just not look right in another. We consider a case study web report successful when it conveys the interesting stories and data you collected in your field investigations, not just because it adheres perfectly to this style.

As an aid to understanding and using these guidelines, we designed the Siegel House Case Study based on the principles from this guide. This guide contains many examples taken from that report, and we suggest you refer to it often as you read through this document and create your own web pages.

Good luck in your work on the web. Please feel free to contact us at Vital Signs if you have questions about this guide, or need clarification about a style point. Happy authoring.

A Roadmap for this Guide

The Overview and Explanations section describes the hows and whys of our Case Study Web Page style. It provides a concise summary of the style and is a great place to start thinking about formatting.

The Technical Page Formatting section goes into detailed descriptions of the HTML code to use when formatting your case-study web pages. It is divided up into the four sections that make up the structure of a case study page: page formatting, header formatting, body formatting, and footer formatting. The body formatting section is further divided up into three sections: summary paragraph, sections and headings, and images. Use the information from these pages when you need specific instructions on HTML code use.

If you want to read this entire document, use the next button in the footer of every page to follow a path once through. Use the map above to jump to a specific page once you understand the the big picture.

Comments to author: vitalsigns@
ced.berkeley.edu

All contents copyright (C) 1998. Vital Signs Project. All rights reserved.

Created: 08/26/96
Revised: 09/09/02

http://www-archfp.ced.berkeley.edu/vitalsigns/bld/case_study_style/intro.html