A journal’s website, called the front-end, is where users will make first contact. It should be carefully curated to convey a chosen set of messages. Importantly, a website may be bound by institutional requirements (e.g., if the journal is hosted by the institution) and might need to comply with specific standards.
Sitemap
Journal websites provide a large amount of information, including scope, aims and focus, editorial policies, articles and more. The content should be structured logically to make it easy to find relevant information.
Creating and brainstorming a sitemap on paper can help design the website’s navigation bar and organise information. For example, what are the different elements you want users to find at a glance? To make this easier, it may be helpful to consider looking at well-established journals in similar fields.
Accessibility
A website’s accessibility is defined in the Web Accessibility Standards. Accessibility standards are defined as A, AA, or AAA, with the latter being the most accessible. It is recommended to always aim for the AA standard as a minimum. Some geographical regions also have their own laws around minimum accessibility standards, so check if this applies to you.
Basic accessibility practices include:
- Using alternative text for figures
- Ensuring that the colour palette has sufficient contrast (e.g. no black text on dark backgrounds)
- Including meaningful links across the website
- Not relying solely on colour to convey information
- Using clear language and avoiding jargon where possible
For more detailed information, see the section on “Accessibility remediation.”
User experience
When designing a website, it is easy to incorrectly assume what our users want and need. It is therefore essential to reach out to users to test journal websites, ideally before their release. User testing tools exist, such as tree testing or card sorting exercises. It is often helpful to ask testers to verbalise their positive and negative experiences when using the website.
For the article pages, you should ensure that all key information is easy to find. This would include at least the article’s title, authors, affiliations, a persistent identifier and a licence. Additionally, ensure that the font size, as well as headings, figures, and tables, are appropriately formatted in both desktop and mobile versions of the website to maximise readability and minimise end-user frustration. It may be helpful to provide download buttons for a PDF version of the article. Article metrics are frequently displayed on the side of the article, but check for standard practices carried out by journals in similar fields.
Tools
The quality assurance of a journal’s appearance could be a complex task that requires performing several and different checks. In order to streamline the process, the following tools are available:
- Web validators and tools (W3C). Tools officially maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium; besides the format-specific tools, W3C also offers a test suite for many web standards (including accessibility).
- Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List (W3C). A list of accessibility evaluators that can be filtered by purpose, licence, standards and more.
- LinkChecker. A long-standing open source tool that reports the status of each link in a website; useful for finding broken links or redirects.
