Web page design tips: CheapSkate's Guide

1 You might be surprised at how little space websites need take up. The first incarnation of this site was only 90k! That was for nine web pages each with a graphical background and a few extra graphics. Don't automatically go for the host offering most space. After all if you need to get bigger you can always get space elsewhere and link to it from the main site.

2 Don't get too carried away with graphics and sounds. Unless these are necessary for your site they will just make it slower to load. Re-use the same graphics on different pages. Your readers browser will only have to load the file once so successive pages will load faster. Slow loads = fewer visitors. A few well-placed graphics will get your message across better than a Waay COol! site that is difficult to read or navigate.

3 Don't make your pages too long. Long pages load slower and the scroll bar can get unusably small.

4 Positioning images and text precisely on screen is difficult. Create a table with hidden borders and place your images and text within the cells. FrontPage Express doesn't seem to display tables properly although they work fine.

5 Beware of designing pages with fancy type. Those fonts are on your computer and may not be available to visitors. (The HTML code tells your visitors' computer which fonts to use. What it doesn't do is pass on the fonts themselves.) If you really need visitors to see things your way you'll need to create a graphic of the text. Remember though - graphics are slow!

6 Graphics are invisible to some visitors - they turn off graphics to speed things up. So make sure you use the Alternative Text to let them know what they're missing!

7 Make sure you enter the dimensions of all graphics if you're writing the HTML yourself. If you don't define a size the browser can't work out how much space to allow for - and it won't display your page until the last file has finished loading.

8 Read a good book. Or two. If you get Webmaster Answers! by Christopher Ditto (published by Osborne) you'll know almost as much as CheapSkate!

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