Website 101

Building a website presence, best practices and common sense.

Just a few things to keep in mind before you manage to repeat the same mistakes everyone else makes, take a quick look at what follows.

Define Your Objectives:
The surest way to fail to reach your goals is never to define them. Many times web projects get started without any real clarity of purpose. This is a guarantee that you will spend too much time, too much money and never be happy with the result. One needs to be clear about targets and expectations if they are to be realized. This is particularly important when technical and non-technical are collaborating.

Remember to answer "The Question":
Later in our process document we will discuss this in more detail, but for now please keep in mind one simple fact, that people visit a web site to answer questions. This means that the web site should be organized in a way the caters to the visitor's questions, not your company's organizational structure. Too often web sites are built in a way that more resembles a given company's organizational chart, rather the than truly attempting to serve their existing and potential customers that visit it. Remember, they came there to answer a question, so be sure you know what it might be and have the answer ready. If a path to "their answer" is not obvious on the home page, that might be all they ever see of your site.

Avoid Graphics/Media Overload:
In today's job market, many so called "Web Designers" rely too heavily on WYSIWYG page layout tools and lack any real understanding of the tool's output. As a result, there are many sites on the web that suffer from a number of all to common problems: 

1. Future update issues: Graphic styles, fonts, color shading and various visual effects, can be difficult to duplicate exactly without having the same tools, the source artwork and exactly the same settings. This can make seemingly very minor changes a nightmare, should someone else ever need to update ANYTHING on your site in the future.
   
   It may require recreating ALL the graphic elements entirely from scratch, if the original source material and information is no longer available and you want new ones to match the old ones. It should always be a basic requirement that you own any and all source artwork and that the details of fonts, styles, point sizes and effects be documented as part of the web sites deliverables.
2. CSS and Cross Browser Compatibility: While this continues to be a moving target, for the most part, today no software has been invented that can deal with the multitude of issues nearly as well as a human that understands them can. Even on simple page designs, popular products like Dreamweaver typically still create source HTML/CSS code that is easily ten times bigger than a moderately talented web developer can, while achieving the same look -n- feel. WYSIWYG layout tools also tend to write overly complex code that is somewhat hard to read. Sooner or later, a human is probably going to need to fix what the software can't.
   
   
3. Heavy, slow pages: Commonly referred to as "Page Weight", the overall download size in bytes, of what has to be sent over the Internet to the user's web browser. The smaller that size is, the faster the page loads. As a rule, text is smaller (i.e. lighter) than graphics and other media are. This is one reason why most web browsers have always had an option to disable graphics all together.
   
   A good site design maintains some level of usability even when graphics are disabled or are otherwise unavailable. While multimedia enhancements like Adobe's Flash are great for adding some visual pop to a web page, they should never be used for a site's navigation elements unless site's design provides an alternative if the user does not have Flash installed or their platform does not support it.
   
   In the mid 90s, a page weight over 128k was considered large, since a fair majority of internet users were using dial-up connections. Today, it is common to find websites that have an initial home page that requires more 3mb just to load. Ask yourself, is that really progress? Monster.com's home page for example, as of this writing, starts a 2.1mb. Makes you wonder if anyone has ever tried to calculate the carbon footprint of excessive pointless bandwidth requirements.

How big is your screen?
Everybody involved in publishing web sites has either done it or seen it done at least once. You build a page layout, paying great attention to detail and get everything lined up just right. Then you show it to someone else, only to realize that your screen is bigger and size really does matter. Suddenly all that time you spent making everything fit just right has gone sideways because your monitor is the only one it fits on without scrolling to see the right side of the page.

Generally speaking, the personality type willing to take on this challenge of building a web site for the first time is also the same personality type that has a 21" monitor when most people have a 15". It is always a good practice to keep in mind the potential technical capabilities your audience may or may not have. Screen resolution is probably the most common issue where web designers fail to remember there are other monitors on earth besides their own, but there are a number of other issues as well. Connections speed, add ons like Flash, sound capabilities, JavaScript and style sheet support, just to name a few, all vary greatly depending on what the user is using to access your site. 

State of THE Art vs. State of "their" Art
Before you start trying to embrace the newest latest technologies, consider your definition of success and how various technologies may or may not actually contribute to it. Just because you can does not mean you should. Developers as a group are by far the worst offenders here. A little common sense goes a long way.