These tips
are designed to help improve your page's performance and to keep your visitors
coming back for more.
Yahoo!
Geocities Guidelines
Most important
REMEMBER,your site must follow all the rules in the Yahoo! GeoCities Content
Guidelines. And any links on the site should be ones allowed in Y!Geocites.
Load
Time
As a general rule,
web surfers are impatient. Very few of us want to wait forever for a page
to load. Keeping this in mind, it is a good idea to try to keep your page's
load time under 30 seconds on a 28.8K modem.
Sometimes it can
be difficult to keep your load time under 30 seconds and still have the
design you want, however you should definitely keep in mind " the longer
the load time the more you will be losing a lot of visitors.
It is true that
many web surfers are using faster 56K or even cable modems now, however
it is important to keep the people with the slower modems in mind.
Navigation
Any visitor to
your website should be able to navigate throughout your site without ever
hitting the BACK button on their browser. In order to make this possible,
be sure to have links to your main page on every page, if not links to
all main sections of your page.
Even if your site
uses frames, keep in mind that not all browsers support frames. If a surfer
cannot see your navigation frame, they will have a difficult time navaigating
throughout your website unless you leave them links on your content pages
as well.
Broken
Links
For the most part,
its important that all of your links work. Nothing looks as bad as following
a link and getting "Whoops! We can't find your page!" or "404 File Not
Found."
Make sure to check
your spelling and capitalization of all links to other pages within your
site. Also, since very few webmasters notify everyone who has linked to
their site personally about changes, visit all of the links on your links
pages every so often to check for sites that have either moved or perhaps
even shut down.
Images
It is often the
images and graphics set the style and look of your page, however as nice
as they may look, even graphics can cause problems. The biggest problem
that a graphic can cause is that of increasing your load time.
There are many ways
to reduce the load time of your graphics. First off, you can always try
to keep them as small as possible. Your images do not need to be
huge, little graphics can also look nice. Also, when making your own graphics,
try to reduce the amount of colors in an image. That will make the file
size smaller.
Finally, keep in
mind that animations take longer to load than normal images. Not only do
to many animated images slow down your load time, but they tend to make
the page look too busy.
Once you think you
have your graphics as fast as they are going to be, there are other little
things you can do to help the load time slightly. For one, always specify
the WIDTH and HEIGHT of an image, especially and image inside a table.
For example
<img SRC="ygeo.gif" height=115 width=468>
Another thing that
you should do for all of your images is include an ALT tag. This will not
help your load time, however it is good for people who use text-only browsers
or have changed their browser settings to not load images. This is especially
important for images being used as links.
Here's how it should
look:
<img SRC="ygeo.gif" ALT="Nashville Site Awards" height=36 width=305>
Another courtesy
that you should make to people surfing without images is to make sure that
your site is navigable and presentable without images. In addition to have
ALT tags on all of your images, also include text links.
Finally, always
check your site for broken images. To avoid broken images, always check
your spelling and capitalization of filenames when making your page.
Remember; filename.jpg
and FILENAME.JPG are not the same thing.
Text
As the text holds
the content of your site, it is important that it is all easy to read.
The most common
problem with text is that a page's background obscures it. If you have
a very colorful and/or busy background image, your text on top of it may
be difficult to read. Your visitors should never have to highlight text
in order to read it. In order to avoid this, consider putting your
text inside a solid colored table. If you need to learn how to make a table
perhaps a class on tables from our Nashville
Schoolhouse .
This is also handy
when using border backgrounds to prevent text from overlapping onto the
border.
There are things
other than a background image that can make text difficult to read. For
example, excessive can be hard to read, if
not just incredibly annoying.
Finally, a last
common problem is bad color combinations. Such things as very light colored
text on a light background can be hard to read. For example, yellow text
on a white background. The same goes for dark text on a dark background,
such a navy blue and black. Two very bright, contrasting colors are also
not good as it is difficult for one's eyes to focus on the text and the
background. For example, red and blue do not go well together in terms
of text and background.
Once your text is
readable, you might discover a few things you hadn't noticed. Always proofread
your text for typso typos and spelling errors. It also can't hurt to have
someone else read over things to see if you missed anything.
Layout
and Design
The layout and
design of many peoples' pages is often the first thing they think about
when designing the page. However, what many people forget is that what
looks good to them may not look good for someone else.
Vertical scrolling
is considered the norm on webpages, however nobody should have to scroll
back and forth AND up and down. Although your page may not scroll horizontally
for you, don't forget about the people who are surfing on laptops and small
monitors with 640x480 resolution. Always design with a width of 640 pixels
in mind. This is especially important when dealing with frames and/or tables.
Being consistant
with your design is also important. Try to keep a similar theme, design,
and color scheme throughout all pages of your site instead of having each
page look like a totally different web site. Your graphics, text, and other
elements should all match and flow together nicely if you are looking for
a professional looking web site.
If possible, always
try to get an idea of what your site looks like on other browsers and monitor
resolutions. Usually what looks good at 800x600 looks cramped and busy
on 640x480. However, if you design for small monitor resolution, usually
it will look good on anything bigger.
Finally, AGAIN,
always keeping load time in mind, sometimes simple good. Elaborate graphical
interfaces may be impressive to look at, however if they load slowly, many
people will leave your site before they ever get to see it. With the exception
of bullets, lines, backgrounds, and buttons, try to keep your extra graphics
to a minimum and only use what is needed.
Background
Music
Believe it or not,
not everyone likes listening to background music when they are surfing
the internet. If a person is working in a computer lab or any job away
from home background music may actualy be very disruptive. Or, maybe a
person is listening to their own music, and they just don't want
to hear yours too. Another big problem with background sound is that it
can significantly slow down your load time.
First off, instead
of making your music background music, try offering it as a link to the
music file for download instead. That way, if people do not want to listen
to it, they don't have to. OR..........
If you still want
background music, make sure that the size of the file is relatively small.
Often a MIDI file will be much smaller and faster to download than WAV,
Real Audio, or MP3.
Finally, don't force
the background music on people. Try to avoid setting your music to
autostart. Also, don't hide the console always leave your visitors the
option to turn the music on and off.
Frames
Some of us may
love to use frames on our sites. However, many people cannot view them
or just would rather not view them. So, if you insist on using frames,
take note of a few things:
First off, as mentioned
under layout and design, when using frames, always keep a monitor resolution
of 640x480 in mind. Don't make your visitors scroll horizontally if its
not needed.
Don't use any more
frames that necessary. Often pages with too many frames can crash some
surfer's browsers. Also, too many frames often makes the page look cluttered
and makes viewing the actual content difficult. Often two frames is sufficient;
one for navigation, one for viewing the content. Three frames is also often
workable. However more than three can often do more harm than good if you
aren't careful. For one thing, the more frames there are, the more stuff
has to be loaded. The more that has to be loaded, the slower the load time.
Also, however many frames you have, try to keep your main frame (the one
holding your site's content) relatively large in comparision to the
others. This makes for easier reading. And keep in mind if frame is stationary
be sure text is not cute off from lack of proper sizing.
It can be very annoying
to surfers as well as other webmasters when other sites are coming up within
your frameset. When usuing frames, it is considered a matter of netiquette
to have all links to outside sites break out of frames.
Finally, always
leave viewers the choice of viewing your page without frames.
Often the best way
to do this is offer links to a frames and a noframes version from your
index.html page. Not only is this a good idea in terms of keeping your
visitors happy, but it is also better for search engines. Many search
engines either index frameset pages incorrectly or not at all since there
is virtually no content on them.
Miscellaneous
As a final note,
always remember to make your site a nice place for visitors. Its always
good to have some unique content that is constantly being updated and improved.
Your most important visitors are the ones who come back. In order to attract
that kind of visitor, you need to provide something new for them to come
back to.
Also, make your
site known to the world. Meta tags are an important first step to getting
visitors and getting on search engines. To learn these, check out the HTML
Goodies' Tutorial on META tags.
Finally, never be
afraid to get someone else's opinion on your site. Feedback can often be
the key to molding your site into what your visitors want to see.
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