Heather Lee's
HTML Lesson 7
Other Information
An important question you should be asking now is "What exactly are you going to put online?". Its a good idea to stop and think about content before you go rushing out to stake out your claim on the web. I know far far too many web page owners who spend all of their time putting up "cooler" or "sexier" layouts. Who cares how pretty it is if there is nothing interesting or of value to your visitors?
If you really want traffic (visitors) to your site, a journal about your life probably isn't going to do it. Well if you are a rock star or a famous hockey player it might, but other wise you should probably come up with some kind of content. In that last example page I made there was very little to attract people. My friends might want to check out those links, but just linking to other pages is no quality content. You might be selling a product or giving away cooking secrets, there is a market for almost everything on the web as long as its well thought out. The more original the content is, the better.
Its also important to think about content in terms of how much there will be. Will you site be just a one page online business card? Or are you building a large online gallery or cookbook? When I started the Emerald Empire it was just a simple little site with a few pieces of my artwork on display for the curious. I had no idea that I would get sucked into web page design and spend hour after hour building new pages for it. There are now over a hundred pages on that portion of my site, which meant I had to completely redesign to make navigation through all that information as simple as possible. If you think your site is going to have many pages in it, its a good idea to plan the site navigation out sooner rather than later.
Things To Avoid
There are many many things that annoy, and drive away visitors to a web page. I have mentioned a few easily addressed ones in the previous pages, but there are quite a few aesthetic choices that are worth thinking over. Since we are moving into the section of lessons dealing with the layout of your page, now is a good time to address them.
Little animations (like the ones on the clip art page) are occasionally fun, and if used sparingly can improve a site. Do not over do it however, animations with out a purpose simply distract the visitor from the content of your page. Also avoid things like blinking or scrolling text, reading on a screen is difficult enough without pointlessly making your visitors try to figure out that sort of thing.
Busy backgrounds do nothing to impress the people browsing your site. If you must use them, place the text in a box with a plain background to make sure its legible. Don't forget, not all people have wonderful eyesight. On the same note, use hight contrast colors for your text and background, black and white generally work best. Please don't put dark blue text on a black or dark purple background. If people have to highlight your text to read it they will just as likely leave your page.
Try to break your pages down into smaller chunks rather than having pages that scroll on forever. Using links to hop from bite sized piece to bite sized piece is far simpler than having to figure out where on a huge scrolling page you are. It will also load far faster.
Avoid using anything on your page that makes the user download a plug-in, font, or program to view... more and more often people just hit the cancel button. Putting good content behind things like that will just result in people never seeing that content.
One last thing to avoid (I'm sure I've missed many of them) is using confusing entry pages and other forms of misleading navigation. If you are using an entry page for some reason, make sure that the way to enter the site is very very obvious. Who wants to hunt through ten miles of web ring links and adds to find the tiny "enter" word written in 5 point font? A picture that tells the visitor what sort of screen resolution or browser they should be using also isn't helpful. Most people will not resize their screens or change browsers just for one site. Try to design your page so that everyone can enjoy it and navigate it easily.
If you would like some nice clear demonstrations on things to avoid why don't you check out Web Pages That Suck. It has some lovely examples of what not to do that should keep you headed in the right direction.
Lesson 8 - CSS Basics coming soon...
| Lesson 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 | Lesson Links | Lesson Clip Art |
