Web Design and Pro-Life Activism

The Pro-Life Action League has always advocated effective action in defense of the unborn. Effective web design fits right into that philosophy. We have sought to make this site simple but graceful, easy to navigate and attractive to read—a useful tool for pro-life activism.

We intend for this site to exemplify the key features of an effective pro-life site. If the World Wide Web is to be a useful tool for pro-life outreach, a pro-life website must be:

Easy to use: Visitors can find what they are looking for and put their trust in the information they find.
Search-engine friendly: Potential visitors will be directed to the site for the pro-life resources they need.
Frequently updated: Visitors will have a reason to make repeat visits and tell others about the site.

Our Guiding Design Principles

We have sought to achieve the three goals above under the guidance of two principles: (1) usability and (2) web standards compliance.

From the underlying site architecture to the presentation of content, our effort has been to make this site easy to use, easy to upgrade and easy to find—all in conformance with the design standards recommended by the W3C, the people who govern the Web.

WWW: The new printing press

Contact our webmaster for more information on designing effective pro-life websites and avoiding the most common design mistakes like too much animation, confusing navigation and slow download times.

[Back to Top]

A Note on Web Browsers

About 1-4% of visitors will not be able to take full advantage of this site because they are using old web browsers. Much of the layout of the site has been deliberately hidden from old browsers, though the full content of the site is available to all. We reason that a bland but useable site is better than a site rendered useless by rampant browser problems.

This site looks best with the new Firefox browser. Netscape 6+, Opera 7 and Internet Explorer 5+ render the site well too. If you're using an older version of either browser, we recommend that you upgrade your web browser.

We assume that those motivated enough to use any of the many other minor browsers out there already know where to find upgrades.

Technical Notes for Web Designers

This design of this site does not use tables, except for the display of actual tabular data—the original intended purpose for table tags. Instead, the layout is governed by CSS. All the code is validated XHTML. Dynamic content is generated using PHP.

We have attempted, as much as possible, to separate content from presentation. Please contact the webmaster if you find any breach of this approach, if you find rendering problems with a particular browser, or if you see room for improvement.