I’ve been designing Web sites for quite a few years now. I have tried to include most of the things that has occurred to me during the past two days. I will keep on updating this piece of advice as and when I remember more tips.
Do I really need a Web site?
This is the first question that you need to ask yourself before you embark on realizing your great dream. You might be wondering why I put that question first. Passion alone doesn’t help in building a great site. It also requires patience, continual effort and, of course, commitment.
What is a good Web site?
I would think of the following aspects to decide whether a site is good or not:
Loads fast. I don’t have to wait too long to see it.
No source code appearing on the browser. The site has to be coded properly
Attractive. I feel like giving a second look.
Easy on the eye. Good choice of colors, good fonts.
Easy to use. Moving around is easy and my mouse doesn’t lose its way.
No dead ends, that is no missing pages, 404 responses and old links.
Information is regularly and frequently updated. This means return visits are fruitful and loyal visitors are not disappointed.
Why do you need a Web site?
Your motivation for a web site may be one, or more, of the following:
Personal
Business
Informative
Whatever it be, you should first decide what you are going to put there. Make sure that your Web site contains information which only you can provide - information that is unique. That is the only way to create a value for your site.
Your Tool Kit
Web Page Editors: Web pages are written in Hyper Text Markup Language(HTML), which is not too hard to learn. Even a simple text editor like Notepad or vi(for Unix fans) will do, if you know HTML. If you are not keen on doing it the hard way you can go for visual editors like Macromedia DreamWeaver, Frontpage Express, Netscape Composer, CoffeeCup HTML and HotMeTaL. A host of free editors(https://homeworlds.com/freesoft/editors.htm or https://thefreecountry.com/ecentricity/htmleditors.shtml) are readily available.
Image Editors: Gone are the days when Web pages had only text. Now we have pictures in the form of GIFs, JPEGs and Flash and Shockwave animations. Popular tools are PaintShop Pro( http://www.jasc.com), Macromedia Fireworks and Macromedia Flash( http://www.macromedia.com), Adobe Photoshop( http://www.adobe.com).
Browsers: People use different browsers and devices to access your web page. So you have to test under as many conditions as you can. As a minimum requirement, you should test your site with Internet Explorer(version 4, 5, 5.5, 6), Netscape Navigator(version 4.5, 4.7, 6), Opera and Lynx(Lynx is a text-only browser). One tip is to test with Netscape browsers while coding. Chances then of your pages rendering gracefully on other browsers are more.
Link Testing: As I said in the beginning a good site ought to have no dead ends or missing links. Fortunately you don’t have to click at each and every link on your pages to do this. I have found the free Xenu’s Link Sleuth(https://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) a good bet for this purpose.
Color Selection Tools: Colors give life and feeling to your site. So a good color picker is a must in your kitty. I would recommend Headoffice Spectroscope(https://headoffice.co.uk/scope.htm).
Site addons: Besides the basic stuff you may wish to have other features like a guestbook, search, and a bulletin board for your site. Fully customizable free search engines are available at https://beseen.com and https://atomz.com. Guest books, hit counters, forums and other addons are available at sites like https://bravenet.com, https://mycomputer.com, and https://htmlgear.com.
Important Tips
Spell check your site before you publish it to the whole world. A page with typing or grammatical errors does not give a professional feel.
Write in good HTML or XHTML. Do follow standards rigourously. It will save you a lot a time and pain.
Design the layout before you start work. Web designers learn called information architecture. It is all about structuring your information in the best possible way.
Use images to enhance, and not to mar, your site. Don’t use much animations: it’s tough on the eye. Go for right colors. Have your photos in JPEG format, other images(those with less number of colors) in GIF. Don’t use any other format, not even BMP). PNG is not so supported yet, so wait. Flash animations are good, but they also increase the download time.
Use Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) along with HTML for presentation. To learn CSS go to https://westciv.com.au/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/. CSS will reduce the size of the pages significantly and will also give increased and easier control over site design modifications
Design for maintenance. Using CSS is a good step in achieving this. Commenting your HTML code also helps to a great extent.
Design for extensibility. What I mean that if you need to add new sections or pages it should not need redesigning the whole site. Maintaining a proper and well designed directory structure for your site will also help.
Making your site popular
Web site popularity is measured in terms of eyeballs or hits. The first important issue is that visitors are not turned away by bad pages or long download times. Secondly, visitors should get a good experience in using the site both in terms of content and navigation. The third issue is to get visitors to come again and also to recommend your site to others.
Search engines are often the reason people turn up at your site. So you have to submit your site at search engines like Google, Yahoo, Altavista, AskJeeves, NorthernLight, Lycos, HotSeek and the like. Also you have to ensure that your site gets a good search engine ranking for common terms. Using meta tags for specifying keywords will help in better search engines indexing. Do keep in mind that there is not much point in trying to fool them by using bogus keywords and spamming. Most often they are much more intelligent than you think, and might ban your site altogether!
Getting your domain name
Find a domain name which is easy to remember. You can check domain name availability at https://whois.net. Buy a domain name only through ICANN accredited domain registrars(https://icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html).
Ensure that you domain will be registered in your name. There are free domain name registrars like NameZero( http://www.namezero.com), but the domain won’t be in your name, and you will have to cope up with banners and ads.
Web Hosting
Free hosting is available from sites like https://tripod.com, https://geocities.com, https://fortunecity.com and many others. There are free hosts like https://brinkster.com which do not put banners on your site.
If you are going for paid hosting, find out a host who has redundant connections to the Internet backbone to avoid site blackouts. A lot of options are available for hosting. Choose the best one.
Now, all the best on your mission. Feel free to contact me either as comments or by mail at bee@cyberspace.org