Building a Web-Features Taxonomy for Structuring Web Design Guidelines

This paper proposes a framework for structuring web design guidelines that incorporates the hierarchies of web features and their semantic relationships with HTML and CSS. It is argued that this approach will be synchronous with the mental model of web designers, thus making the guidelines more usable. In addition, this approach embraces both external and internal aspects of web design, so there is little compromise on the coverage of web design issues. An experiment was conducted to compare the relative effectiveness of the proposed framework with other guideline structures (e.g., principle-oriented and a mixture of principle and feature-oriented). There was evidence that the principle-oriented guidelines performed worse than the other structures, but the analyses failed to establish that the proposed framework as the most effective. The experiment showed promising results but it suffered from small sample size. In spite of this, it is believed that the proposed taxonomy and framework has laid the groundwork for future research.