Miscellaneous Hints


  1. Try to keep your audience within your own pages. If you send the viewer to another site...they will probably not come back. You finally got the researcher there...so don't send them away. When you have a link to another site, add into your href tag target="new". When the viewer clicks on the link, the page will then open in a new browser window.

    If you want to include links to the major search engines on your page (Google, etc)...don't put the link on the main page. You will lose your audience for sure!
  2. Guestbooks should be placed at the bottom of your page. If you put it at the top of the main page, the viewer has nothing to comment on.
  3. After getting permission to use a graphic, be sure to save it on your own server. Linking back to the other server, puts a burden on the server every time someone looks at the image. It also slows down the loading of your page. Another problem-if the graphic is removed from the other site for whatever reason, or if the graphic is moved, you will have a dead link and the image will not be viewable on your pages.
Now that you are all done...you can put it up on the server...NOT

BEFORE you upload your webpages to your web space provider and submit to search engines, do a bit of double checking. Just because a page looks okay on your desktop computer, that does not mean it will be okay on the web.

If your file is named index.html. Rename it or put it into a test directory first. View the file from your server as if an ordinary viewer was looking at it. You may find something wrong with the page after it is up on the server...bad image links, formatting off, etc. There is no need to hurry with the changes because it isn't your final version.

Do this especially if you are updating pages. That way you don't blow away the pretty good file with a new unreadable or messed up page.

Get yourself an HTML validator. A validator can check on open tags, check links, and correct it for you. I can write HTML in my sleep...but sometimes we get distracted and forget " or a > at the end of a tag. Netscape will do funny things to pages with bad code. Do it!...it will save alot of headaches.

Use a spell checker(especially those of you that can't spill very well)<G>. There is nothing more irritating to me than a page with all sorts of bad spelling. Besides it can change the entire meaning of your statement.

You are running out of server space oh no!
Here are some things you can do:
Don't use background images. Use a solid color instead.
Look at your images sizes. If they are very large, look into finding ways to reduce the size. Clipart should be saved in gif format instead of a jpg. This sometimes cuts your image size in half.
Don't use sound. Sound files can take up alot of space. It also really slows down page loading which will turn away viewers.

THE END