Web Design.Making a Web Page.Making a page to be viewed on the internet is simple. Open a new page in your text editor [NOT a fancy word-processor], and type the following: <HTML> Custard. </HTML> Now save it as a text file with the file extension .html. There. You just made a web page with the word 'custard' in it. This is a good web page, because it's simple, and it'll load like lightning in the buggiest browser on the slowest internet connection. The more HTML code and images there are in a web page, and the more files it calls, the slower it loads, and the more likely it won't be optimized for viewing by your customer. Unfortunately for the commercial webmaster, these are often not considerations for his boss. In fact the reverse is the case. The boss wants to see his money on that thar' web page, so animated gifs and frames and Macromedia Flash and Java and JavaScript are the order of the day. The internet is currently used to present the same data as might be run locally as a program on the surfer's pc; effectively, business presentations. The only problem is the internet was designed to send discrete blocks of simple text, and not every surfer has a 2GHz pc with the latest bloated software on it. By designing a web page you are taking your first steps into computer programming, and the first rule of computer programming is KISS; Keep It Simple, Stupid. Why? Because computers, unlike humans, operate in a linear, logical fashion. The more variables there are in a program, the more likely it is to exit with an error immediately. This can be very frustrating, and a great waste of time and energy, so Keep It Simple. To return the HTML [Hyper Text Mark Up Language]. What else do you need to know? Well, HTML is made up of 'tags' like the two above, and the text between the tags. The text between the tags is affected by the tags. The tags tell the browser how to display the text. Depending on what the tags are, it may become a hyperlink or just display differently. You don't need to know HTML to make web pages, in the same way you don't need to be a computer programmer to write a document in Microsoft Word. As you progress however you'll find yourself using the 'view source code' function in your browser or HTML editor to see exactly what's going on in the page, and correcting any little quirks. Just find a simple page on the web or your pc, and use the 'view source' option in your browser to see the HTML code. A lot of web pages are made by WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] editors, so there may be a lot of formatting junk in the code. Find a simple page, and open it up. And that's it really. Like anything else on the web, you need to search, read and practice. If it's a web-related topic be sure there's lots of information about it on the web itself. All you need to do is go to a search engine and type in related keywords. Webmasters should also note that the two main browsers on the internet, Internet Explorer and Netscape, do not support exactly the same set of tags; what works in one may not work in another. This is why some sites are optimised for one or the other, and surfers may find themselves re-directed to an optimised site by some clever .htaccess coding. Making sites on the same domain optimized for one or the other browser doubles your workload, so try to avoid doing this. If you are an employee, just tell your boss it'll double his costs to do so. Webmasters often whine that their lovely code won't work in Netscape or Internet Explorer. Or that they've uploaded it to the server, and now it won't work. If they researched the mechanics of the internet itself, which is basically held together with sticky tape and good wishes, they'd be glad their pages displayed at all. This book is about the nitty-gritty of commercial web design, from the ecommerce perspective i.e. what you are NOT likely to find searching around on Altavista, because for every thirty webmasters tiddling around with FrontPage, there's one wrestling with password protection, Perl, hacking, databases and telnet. This book is for the latter individual. Web Design Tips and Tricks. 1. Stitch your pages. Use Server-Side-Includes or a database. Make pages out of standard header and footer files. The content of the page forms the body. In this way you can make global changes to your site in minutes. The site has a uniform look. 2. Make it obvious. Your site should have only one purpose. Each page should have its individual purpose. What do you want the surfer to do? Make it glaringly obvious. Make all other links, images, buttons or text smaller and less obvious, or better, remove them. Assume the surfer is stupid, drunk, or brain dead. Can they still get to what they want in five seconds? 3. Keep to a single style. Having seen one page, a surfer should know exactly where to look on any other, to get what they want. 4. Cut the crap. No one give a sh*t about your Flash intro. Fat graphics cause a page to load slowly. Java f*cks up Netscape browsers. Some webmasters are arrogant enough to demand that surfers upgrade to view their site. Surfers are smart enough to go to a faster one. 5. Not all tags are equal
6. Interaction is a buzz word. Make your site as playable as a pinball machine. Chat rooms, discussion boards, games, polls. Better yet, have one single great feature; that's what they'll remember, and tell their friends about. 7. A Logo. A logo should be a picture. The picture should symbolise your site. We learned to draw before we could read. The brain retains symbols much more easily than text.
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