Tips On Building a Web Page

Building a webpage takes a whole lot of time, and can be tedious. Maintaining it takes much more time (a fact which surprises many people) and can be even more tedious. Here are some very important tips to consider when building your web page.

First and most important, whatever you put on your web page, it has to be of interest to you. If you are not passionate about, or at least interested in, the topics your site covers the whole process can lose its appeal rapidly. Its exactly like crocheting a large afghan project as a present for someone else when you personally hate the pattern you're building.

Providing unique or hard-to-find information is exactly the thing you want to do. If it appears as if that’s the track you are headed on, don't loose your step, rather keep at it! Doing so will make your site extremely valuable.

Once the site is ready, look at it on as many platforms, screen resolutions and browsers as possible. If someone with a small screen has to scroll side-to-side, they will not come back. Most important on your home page, not quite as important on secondary pages- you must capture your viewer's interest in the first 4 inches of the page. That’s all that shows on many viewers’ web browsers. And if they’re not interested, they won't take the time to scroll down to see what else there you have to offer.

If your site is intended to be used by people from home, make sure to try it out with someone’s 56k modem to see how fast it loads. Or run a page load check to see how efficient your page load is... or isn't. You have 10 seconds to get something interesting loaded up, otherwise people will leave the site as fast as they arrived.

Try looking and navigating the site with image loading turned off. Is the site still usable? Not pretty, just usable. People with slow Internet connections often browse with images off.

A pet peeve of mine about many *commercial* web sites...

An amazingly large number of sites make their business contact information extraordinarily difficult to find. Sometimes the address is buried 5 levels deep on an order form, the email address is hidden behind an icon pointing to a CGI script, and the phone numbers are buried on an about us page.

I usually wonder, “Don’t you *want* people to be able to contact you?! My record so far is the time I spent 20 minutes trying to find the street address for a store from their WWW site. I never did find it. I know I could have sent email and asked, but that would have been cheating. :-) And then there are those sites where they don’t mention the business name (I’m not making that up!)

So, to anyone with a commercial site, selling a product or service, put the following on your front page or have a link on your front page pointing to one page with the following information:

  -Business name
  -Street address and/or PO Box
  -Every phone number that applies- toll free, regular, ordering.
  -Fax number
  -Email address, spelled out in text.
  -URL address for the site.

This might not appear to make sense at first, because they’re at your site already. But maybe they want to print the page out and save it as a reference.

Continued- Tips On Building A Web Page