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The following tips
are my opinions only. If you have any more advice then feel free to e-mail me and I'll do my best to include
it next week.
Contents:
Content
is king!
Style
consistency
Colour
and backgrounds
Images
and graphics
Navigation
Compatibility
issues
Finding
a host
Publishing
Promoting
your site
Webpage
editors
Advanced
issues
Final
thoughts
1. Content is king!
People use the web for a variety if reasons, but the main ones are for information and entertainment. The content of your site is what can
attract more people than fancy graphics and pretty colours. If you want visitors to keep coming back, then updating
the content on a regular basis is a good idea.
Make sure your pages are free of spelling / grammatical errors and don't forget to make good use of punctuation. TOP
2. Style consistency.
Try to keep to the same theme throughout the site so that users feel accustomed to it. I've visited sites where different pages have
completely different layouts / colours and they make me feel like I'm on
a different site altogether. TOP
3. Colour and
backgrounds.
Use colours that contrast or compliment each other well. Try to make them
applicable to your sites' purpose. A bad example would be to make a
humorous site using beige and dark brown! Bright colours would give the
pages a more fun feel.
Patterned backgrounds can make the text difficult to read so if you have
to use them, just have them in the navigation bar.
Choose colours from the
web friendly palette
so that visitors with lower spec machines still see the right colours. TOP
4. Images and graphics.
Keep image file sizes below 20K if at all possible. Large images can take a long time to download for your visitors. They may become
impatient and decide to go elsewhere. There are many ways of making image files smaller including re-sizing the actual image or saving it as
a .gif file - which will compress it. Photos should be saved as .jpg files
for the web.
Thumbnail images are another option. A thumbnail is a small image that
the visitor can click on if they want to view the larger version. Don't forget to use alt labels so that people who don't have graphics
enabled in their browsers get a text explanation of what the image is about or what it is linked to. This also helps sight
impaired
visitors who use a text reader.
If you need to add
any large images to your pages (e.g. an image map), another
good idea would be to slice the image into smaller pieces, then to put
each piece into a cell in a table. This can reduce download times.
A bad idea in my opinion is the use of animated clip art. When I visit a
site with these I tend to click my browser back button! I find that they distract me from reading the content of a page and don't seem
to
have a purpose. TOP
5. Navigation.
A simple, easy-to-use navigation system is important. Visitors want
to be able to find information they require without having to wade through too many pages. Every page of your site should be accessible
within 2 or 3 clicks of the main page.
There are many ways of making pages easy to find. Drop-down boxes, search boxes, frames, and a site map page are good ways of making
information easy to find. Be careful with frames though. Too many can confuse visitors and they also make it difficult for search engines to
link to. They can cause problems when visitors want to add certain pages in a
framed site to their favourites / bookmarks list. TOP
6. Compatibilty issues.
When developing your site, bear in mind that your visitors may not have
the same browser or computer as you. Try to check your site in different browsers. The most popular ones are Internet Explorer and
Netscape Communicator / Navigator. Another browser becoming quite popular is Opera. Another thing to watch out for is that some of your
visitors may have an older version of a browser which may not display your lovely DHTML scrolling text (lucky for them I say!).
You could go even further by getting your site checked by someone else
on their computer. Your site might look great on your PC with I.E. 5.5 but
could look like a dog's dinner on someone else's Mac with Netscape! ]
Another thing
you can do is to check the site with different screen resolutions so
that you can see what it will look like on a smaller / larger screen. TOP
7. Finding a host.
There are plenty of companies on the web offering free webspace although
some have a catch. You may have to have a banner advertisement of
their's flashing away at the top of your pages. Or you may have to have
a long domain name like www.myisp.com/yourname/home.htm - not easy to
remember!
You can by your own domain name for a very low price from several reliable
companies who also offer cloaked web redirection for a small fee. I'll
be adding some links to these and lots more free web stuff soon. TOP
8. Publishing.
There are different ways of publishing your site but the main way is by
using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program like Cute FTP or Terrapin
FTP. Some of these are available totally free to download or for a
30 day trial.
Another way of uploading a site to your webspace is directly via
your html/webpage editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver (if you have one).
TOP
9. Promoting your site.
When your site is finally uploaded and ready you may want to register it
with search engines. You can register them manually yourself by going to
each search engine site or you can use a program to do it for you. I
personally submit my url to search engines manually as some of them let
you choose an appropriate category to add your url to. Go to my Search
Engine Registration URLs
page for a list of links.
Another way of attracting visitors to your site is by getting someone you
know to link to yours and vice versa. If it's a commercial site then you
could consider advertising with other forms of media including local
papers. TOP
10. Webpage editors.
There are a vast amount of programs available to use when building
webpages. Some are WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs which
enable you to layout everything on the page and see it as you build it,
with little knowledge of html.
Examples of these are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage.
These programs are expensive but trial versions are available to
download from the web for free.
Other editors help you to write the html code of your pages. This is by
far the cheapest option and is also a good way of improving your html
coding skills!
My favourite editor has to be Dreamweaver as it doesn't mess up code like FrontPage seems to. I like to use FrontPage for laying out
tables on a page, then tweak the code using Dreamweaver. It also has
more advanced functions like layers, behaviours and a templates function
which enables you to make a template that can then be changed (to change
all of your pages in one go). TOP
11. Advanced
issues.
ASP, CSS, DHTML, Flash, Perl, E-Commerce. These are a handful of the
more complex features you can add to your website. I will not even try
to go into detail about them as I will be learning some of them myself!
There are plenty of websites with lots of useful information about these
aspects. TOP
12. Final thoughts.
Remember that not everyone who visits your site will like purple background with yellow spots and orange text. Try to make the
design of
your site as appealing as possible to as many people as possible.
Write about things that interest you because this will show in your content and is more likely to make the visitors interested.
Read as much information as possible about web design and join newsgroups about it.
Enjoy yourself!
When you've published your site, why not
send me the URL and I could
link to it from here.
One more thing.. learn
from other peoples' sites!
Sarah's
design tips
TOP
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