A new report from the federal government distills thousands of pages of research down to 187 key recommendations for how web sites should be constructed to maximize their effectiveness as communication tools.

The "Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines," released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), can help educators and others design their own web sites based on proven research about what works--and what doesn't--to ensure the greatest use among stakeholders. For example, are school web site designers using the best fonts, download times, screen resolution, or sentence length?

"When we start using our own guesswork, literally, we find our web sites are all over the place," said SanJay J. Koyani, senior usability engineer in the Office of Public Affairs at HHS. "It's not good to have consistently bad web sites."

As many as 1,000 research papers on web design are published each year, Koyani said--but many of them are hard to access or understand, and not all of them are relevant.

"The No. 1 problem was none of [these studies] agreed, and the second problem was none of them referenced research," he said.

In the Usability Guidelines report, however, each recommendation receives two ratings: one to gauge its "relative importance" to the success of a web site, and another to determine its "strength of the evidence."

Some recommendations have a greater impact on the overall success of a web site than others, and the available research to support each recommendation is not equal in quality and scope, Koyani said.

Researchers audited and reviewed many research papers and a dozen popular web design style guides before settling upon their 187 guidelines, organized into 13 chapters.

The report addresses topics such as web accessibility, navigation, page layout, titles and headings, writing for the web, graphics, animation, searches, and more.

"I thought it was interesting that there was so much information and research out there," Koyani said. "I had no idea there was such conclusive data on this stuff."

Initially, this compendium of the latest research began as a project to help the National Cancer Institute (NCI) create more usable cancer information web sites, so the guidelines are consistent with NCI's cancer information dissemination model: "rapidly collect, organize, and distribute information in a usable format to those who need it."

But the usefulness of the report grew to encompass all web developers.

"These guidelines aren't prescriptive; they are guides," Koyani said. "The goal is not to stifle creativity, it's to give people starting points."

Koyani warns that many of the guidelines seem simple and obvious, but many web site developers nonetheless fail to follow them.

For example, the report recommends that a web site should be easy to find online, because research shows that web searchers won't look past the first 30 responses generated by a search engine query.