Six things not to do when building a website.

[Posted 03/08/2009 at 1:05 PM | No Comments]

nottodo

Building a website is a hard thing to do especially when you are a beginner. Many resources are on the web right for you to use, including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Of course for the serious coders there is Ruby on Rails. These five items listed below are just a very small spectrum of the design world. Read it carefully, understand it, and take what I have to say seriously. The design world can be a brutal one, there is a lot of competition and you need to figure out how to stand above them all. So, how are you going to do that?

1) Flash or XHTML with CSS?

Look people, this decision is not a hard one. Your website needs to look like you spent a long time on it, that does not mean you make two seperate ones. If you want to incorporate flash within your HTML website, go ahead. If you want to construct a full flash site, go ahead, although that might not be the best thing to do. Your website needs to, and should, get the viewers attention very quickly. When the viewer goes to your website, they should be able to click on what they want right away. Not have a trick question in front of them. Door A or Door B.. which should I pick? DO NOT make a splash page asking your viewer to choose between flash or html. Most computers already come with the flash player installed already, don’t warn your guest they need to download it. The image below is something I found when I Googled… don’t do this.

enterflashhtml

2) Firefox

We are in 2009. When creating your website make sure it works in both Internet Explorer and in Firefox. Many users now use Firefox as their standard brouser. Firefox uses the ‘correct’code when viewing websites whereas IE is very buggy. Firefox will pick up almost every error in your code where IE would look right past it. Make sure you download it and view your website using that from now on.

3) Load time

Remember the 56k days when you sat in front of your computer for 30-40 minutes waiting for something to finish downloading? How about you start the download on something and when you wake up the next morning, it is still not done? I remember those days and believe me, they were annoying. Make you images website optimized. Image maps are great, but if the images are huge, it is not worth it. Do not make your customer wait for your website to load. After awhile, they will get aggrevated and think back to the 56k days.

4) Hyperlinks

Make sure your hyper links are a totally different class when you are designing in CSS. I have found myself clicking over underlined words to find out it wasnt a hyperlink, it was just an underlined word. Please stop!

5) Resizing browser windows

Although this may be a very cool javascript, it is not nessesary. A lot of using use a lot of different monitor. I, for one, have a 24in HP monitor which is set at the heighest resolution. Do not automattically make your website resize to the size monitor/resoluation it was intended for.

6) Correct CSS coding

As you may already know, CSS is what makes your website look ‘pretty’. You build your layout around CSS and it is only right to code it properly. In my opinion, it all depends on the application or the website you are building. Usually every website has a style.css (or whatever other name you decide). In that file is where all your CSS should go. If you are like me, you use quite a bit of CSS thereofre a style.css may not be the only thing to use. I fill my .html files with CSS all the time as well. However, you want to make sure you close all open tags, use it properly, and do not over use it within your .html.