4. Consistency is key

"Trust is built with consistency."”

-Lincoln Chafee

One of the easiest ways to build trust with your students is to maintain consistent design elements across your course.

Some examples of effective website design by way of consistency are:

  • Maintaining the same navigation
    • ex: if you decide to change the Front Page every week, change it every week
    • ex: if you provide an overview and summary page for one module, consider creating consistent module layouts for the rest of your course
  • Keeping the same color scheme and fonts across each page
    • choose 2-3 colors
    • Canvas doesn't allow fonts (yet) but choose 1-2 fonts if you must deviate from the default. 
  • Using the same heading styles
    • AKA the heading look and feel if you're using HTML, for example, if you style every Heading 2 bold, get ready to take an hour or two to apply the same look throughout the course! Yes, it can take that long, so I recommend using Canvas' default heading styles
    • Leverage Canvas' built-in heading styles to save you time and maintain consistency with your students' experience with other courses. Most faculty will not be increasing the Paragraph and Heading size in their courses. Also, doing so may inhibit students who have disabilities from customizing pages to fit their needs. 
  • Maintaining a consistent image style and size
    • Consider choosing a specific filter to add on each page to help all the images in your blend despite being curated from various sources. Canva Links to an external site. can help with this. 
    • Consider choosing a specific size for images when possible to create cleaner pages. 
  • Maintaining a consistent video size

Effective website design requires one consistent motif across the entire course. Pages can have slightly different layouts to keep your website visually interesting, but they need to match. You definitely don’t want students clicking onto a new page only to wonder if they’ve clicked onto a new course entirely!