Mar 26, 2002 01:50 AM
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(Updated Mar 26, 2002 01:52 AM)
I label this as part-1 as hopefully I shall continue to write more on this topic. It is too big to be covered in one article. I do hope this line of presentation is appreciated as I see there are a lot of countrymen online but only a small percentage doing some HTML work and putting up pages online, whether a personal homepage or a more business oriented website. This of course is for the novices at web publishing and the more experienced guys here might not find anything new in this article.
1. The basics. Before you go online and publish your web pages, it is necessary to do a little ground work. More website designing will be done with your computer off than with it on so do not switch it on to design your site before you have decided on the basics. This will include the page layout, what sort of graphics and visuals you are going to use and the content. If you are taking your site online, you better have something to put there. So sit down and put down things on a paper before you put them on screen.
2. HTML Though there are a number of WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get) HTML editors available in the market, trying to design a web page without knowing a little bit of HTML is like trying to make a cake without flour. What I suggest is to use a WYSIWYG editor and then edit the source manually so as to obtain the best result as desired. There are a number of these editors available and they vary in cost from free(Amaya) to expensive(Dreamweaver).
3. Site optimization. A good web page is one that should load up fast and is easy to view. So the total amount of HTML on a page including the graphics should not be ideally more than 100 kb. If possible even less. Of course with broadband connectivity coming in, this figure is open to question. To achieve these ends, you should know how to tweak your HTML and remove unnecessary tags, optimise your images so they load faster and design pages so that the text portions do not have to wait for the images to load first(like in nested tables.but more on this later). Image optimization is a large topic by itself and can be discussed separately in a subsequent part of the series.
4. Navigation When designing your site, remember to design it in a way that makes it easy for the visitors to move from one page to another in a logical sequence. Do not keep links to important pages hidden deep in the site and also try to provide a page which will act as a site map. All this requires careful and logical planning so take out those papers and pens now.
These 4 steps should get you kick started into thinking about your site. As I said, the first thing is to design it in one's mind and only then put it up for designing it on the PC. get up to speed and wait for Part-2 of the tutorial coming soon.
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