Here are just five the tips I’ve picked up while designing our Echostains site. If I'd known these when I first started designing the web site, life would have been much more straightforward!
1. Keep it Simple.
Don’t put too much content on your pages. Web sites that use flashing banners and dancing animations are all well and good, but can take an age to load for poor dial-up users. Your visitors will get tired of waiting and will just go of to another site if your page takes longer than 60 seconds to load. The first version of Echostains had a great animation of a collage which I had made to build up piece by piece. Although we thought it was cool , it was taking around 4 minutes to fully load!
2. Keep it Small.
Save your images in the format known a .jpeg or .jpg. This type of file can be compressed into a smaller size to quicken up the time they take to load. Remember, the larger the file size, the longer the image will take to load. If any of your images are showing their size in megabytes (eg2mb or 1.2mb) they are way too big. You need to get them down into kilobytes (eg 500kb ) by making them smaller with your image editing programme.
3. Don’t Splash.
Another mistake I made at first was to have a splash screen. These are the web pages that say ‘Click here to enter’ or just have the site’s name which you click to enter the main site. These are great fun for the web-site designers, but really all you are doing is putting a barrier in front of your site. If people are visiting your site they are doing so because they want to see you work and not to be faced with another obstacle to cross before they get there. The more things visitors have to click to get to the part of your site they want, the more they are likely to tire and go somewhere more accessible. Every page of your site should be only a couple of clicks from your home page. This is why it is so important to design your site’s layout on paper first.
4. Get a Domain.
I would recommend that all of you who decide to have a go building your own site register your own distinct name. Your site will then feel like an entity in its own right as you will be the only person in the world who has this unique name. You can even download a certificate to prove you are the rightful owner. You can register a domain name through loads of sites on the net but I would recommend registering it with the same company that you choose to host your site. Guess what? We didn’t and had to pay extra to have the name transferred over to our hosting company, so be warned.
5. Name Your Pages.
As you save your pages onto your computer, take a few seconds to give it a proper name otherwise your pages will have names like untitled1.htm, untitled2.htm etc. It’s much better to see names like ‘gallery.htm’ or ‘drawings.htm’ in your browser’s address bar. Try to avoid spaces in your titles as well, they look fine on your computer but when shown in the address bar once you are online they appear quite different. For example, the link to our links page comes up as http://www.echostains.co.uk/Links%20page.htm -- the part that says %20 is how a space appears in a browser. I will get round to changing it and maybe it’s just me being fussy, but once your site is up and running you will probably find yourself becoming this way too.
Well, I hope that I have inspired some of you to have a go at starting your own web site and you have realised it’s not as difficult as you may have first thought. If you have a computer and can type -- albeit with one finger like myself -- then you are already half way there.
Written and copyrighted by Steve Roberts]
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