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The purpose of the LINMO guidelines is to facilitate the development of content-rich web sites that conform to the LINMO model and that thus maximize usefulness and convenience to as large and diverse an audience as possible. The guidelines are not designed to produce web sites that conform to any current trends or fashions in web site technology or design. A guideline is a recommended approach, course of action, parameter, etc. for conducting an activity in order to attain some goal, such as maximum performance, efficiency, quality, etc. Guidelines can be viewed as a standard, which is a uniform set of specifications for some or all aspects of a product (i.e., a good or service). Among the intended audience for LINMO-compatible web sites are people (1) with varying levels of knowledge about the topic (ranging from complete beginners to experts), (2) who reside in countries and regions where Internet connections are slow or erratic, (3) whose native language is not the same as that in which the site is written (and for whom the language of the site is a second or third language) and (4) who use alternative technologies to access web content (e.g., hand-held devices, text-to-speech converters, or printed copies of individual pages1). Such sites are designed to be suitable for individual use, for classroom use and for reference use. The guidelines are not yet complete, as a number of additional categories remain to be added and further refinements may be required for already published categories. Among the categories that will be added in the near future are coding, colors, columns, content management systems, definitions, documentation, exceptions, footnotes, images, indexes, internationalization, legal issues, metadata, navigation, page revision, quality control, search engine optimization, search mechanisms, spin-off sites and sponsor pages.
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Created May 8, 2006. |