Consider Your Purpose and Role

As you consider your purpose and role in creating a Web page, you must reflect not only on what you hope to accomplish — informing or persuading your readers, for example — but also on how you can work with the complex array of design, navigation, and media elements that you might use to achieve your purpose. Web pages can engage readers in ways that print documents cannot — they can link directly to related pages, allow visitors to access video and audio files, and support communication among the Web site’s readers and writers. This wealth of organization, navigation, and design options, however, carries significant composing and design challenges, such as keeping your readers focused on reading your page instead of following links to other sites.