Frontpage 2003
Home Up

 

BROWSING BROWSER OPTIONS IN FRONTPAGE

Using FrontPage, you can choose a Web browser platform for which you want to optimize your site, and you can also pick and choose among browser-specific design effects. You need to think about this now - before you embark on site-building - because, based on your choices, FrontPage makes decisions about how it carries out text formatting and other design tasks. Furthermore, FrontPage makes available in its menus and toolbars only those effects that will work in your chosen platform.

 

CENSORSHIP AND YOUR SITE

Censorship is an ugly word to most people, especially in connection with the Internet. Unfortunately, in running your own Web site, you sometimes find that you need to limit in some way what others can post to your site. In extreme cases, you may even need to bar a particularly disruptive person from posting in, for example, your chat room. If your intention is simply to keep someone from voicing an opinion, you're engaging in censorship, plain and simple. If your intention is to defend the free speech rights of the rest of the members against someone who's interfering with them, that's another matter entirely.

This topic isn't an idle philosophical matter but a very real consideration that you'll likely need to face as a Webmaster. It's a sad fact that someone, sometime, will probably jump into the middle of your nice, happy online community and try to mess it up. Although you may expect a certain amount of disagreement and even heated discussion in any group, personal attacks and deliberate disruption of discussions are different matters. As a Webmaster, your responsibility is to act for the benefit of your peaceful visitors. And there are times when that means you have to ban a troublemaker from your site.

 

IF IT'S BROKEN...FIND IT AND FIX IT!

Few things are more irritating than a bunch of broken links. Visitors won't mind the occasional click that takes them to a Page Not Found error - after all, the Web is a fast-changing place. But when broken links show up over and over again, visitors are going to decide that your site isn't worth all the trouble you put them through.

So what can you do? You can take all the care you want with your own site's internal links, but the links that lead to other people's sites are totally out of your control. Sites go down, and pages and files change location, but the Webmasters in charge of those sites aren't likely to keep you notified.

The real solution is to click every single link in your entire site on a regular basis. Fortunately, you don't have to wear out your mousing finger, though. You can sign up with a paid service that will automatically check hundreds, even thousands, of pages on a single site.

 

GET REAL WITH YOUR HIRED HELP

How much of your own time and effort are you going to put into your Web site? Presumably, you're at least going to control the general design and make the key decisions about content. Most likely, you're doing the actual page creation as well. If not, you need to make sure that the people who are doing the coding know what they're doing and exactly what you expect of them.

When searching for qualified people to create your Web site, don't rely on college degrees, paper certifications, and the like. Make candidates show you their previous work. Go to their Web sites and explore them thoroughly. Test everything that you find to determine if a candidate has the necessary skill and experience to implement the features you want to include on your site.

 

BIG ON WEB-BASED IMAGES

Many Web pages are burdened with images that, although beautiful, take a long time to load - so long that many users may give up before the pages are completely loaded. Remember that not everyone has a computer or Internet connection as fast as yours.

Take a few steps to make your Web pages load more quickly. The main step, of course, is to limit the size of the images you use by shrinking them with a graphics editor like Paint Shop Pro. A 20K (20,000 bytes big) image takes twice as long to load as a 10K image, which takes twice as long to load as a 5K image. You can estimate that images load at 1K per second on a 56Kbps dialup connection, so a 5K image loads in about five seconds, which is pretty fast; a 120K image takes two minutes to load, so that image had better be worth the wait.

Consider putting a small image on a page and give visitors an option (via a link) to load the full-size picture. In GIF files, images with fewer colors load faster than images with more colors. If you use a graphics editor to reduce a GIF from 256 colors to 32 or even 16 colors, often the appearance hardly changes, but the file shrinks dramatically. Set your graphics program to store the GIF file in interlaced format, which lets browsers display a blurry approximation of the image as it's downloading, to offer a hint of what's coming.

 

LOOKS COUNT IN CYBERSPACE

The way your page looks is critical to how effectively it does its job. Check out the following list and imagine what you might think if you saw pages that matched these descriptions.

  • Plain = uninteresting: If the site is too plain, people won't be interested and may not stick around long enough to get to the important information.
  • Busy = disorienting: If the page is a riot of images and colors, people may be overwhelmed and visit another site just to give their eyes a rest.
  • Theme doesn't match content = a joke: Visitors won't take you or your information seriously if your design doesn't match the information on the page. (A Hawaiian luau, for example, really isn't an appropriate theme for a resume page unless you cater luaus for a living.)

Although you can continually tweak and update the look and feel of your page, it's a good idea to set aside some time before you build the page to decide what you want it to look like. Some quick and easy routes to an initial design idea include these:

  • Bookmark or print pages from other Web sites whose designs are similar to what you want to use.
  • Sketch a design on paper or even a napkin at a restaurant. Just don't smear ketchup on the design.
  • Clip ads and other layouts from magazines if they spark your interest

 

META TAG, YOU'RE IT!

Your goal in putting a Web site online probably is to make a certain body of information accessible to the public. Search engines can help users track down your site, but you can improve the likelihood of search engines listing your site by including special HTML code on your pages. This special code is contained in meta tags (tags defined using the <meta> keyword) and consists of keywords and descriptions that you create to help search match user queries with your Web pages.

 

ROYALTY-FREE AND RIGHTS-MANAGED STOCK PHOTOS

You can find two major kinds of stock photos on the Web: royalty-free and rights-managed. You pay once for royalty-free stock photos and can then use them freely. Rights-managed stock photos, which are likely to be of very high quality, are carefully limited as to their use, based on considerations such as the size, placement, length of time you use them, number of people who view them, and so on. Carefully study the license for any kind of stock photo you acquire to make sure that the rights granted fit your needs.

 

CREATING PROGRAMMING- AND DATABASE- DRIVEN SITES

Many Web sites these days go beyond plain HTML to include programming code that makes the sites interactive and responsive to individual user needs and preferences. For example, when you visit an online store and add items to your shopping cart, the Web pages you see are different from the ones other visitors see. Each visitor's shopping cart is unique; everyone's view of the shopping cart in a Web browser is unique.

HTML is designed only to help you display information. If you want that information to provide a smart response for different viewers (such as varying the display automatically to fit the person viewing it), you'll need some other technologies in addition to HTML.

 

THE THRILL OF THEMES IN FRONTPAGE 2003

One of the sexier features in FrontPage 2003 is its extensive collection of graphical themes. Themes are coordinated sets of fonts, colors, graphics, and backgrounds that you can apply to your Web site. Here's an example of how it works: When you create a new Web page that is formatted using a theme, it will already have a predetermined look and feel. If you decide to insert a horizontal line, a custom-designed graphic line that coordinates with that look appears in place of the standard gray stripe.

 

WORDS OF WEB WISDOM:  PLAIN AND SIMPLE

Avoid excessive embellishment in the language of your site as well as in its design and gadgetry. Stick to basic sentence structures. Keep sentences, as well as paragraphs, short. Go with just one idea per paragraph and one point per sentence. Say what you have to say to make your point, but say no more than that. Use plain language - ordinary words like use win out over words like utilize. Plain English is simple, honest, and without hype. It doesn't let cleverness obscure meaning. Be unambiguous. Use words exactly as they are really, truly defined and use any given word to mean the same thing every time you use it.

 

PUTTING OUT THE WELCOME MAT TO THE RIGHT AUDIENCE

Who is your Web site targeting? A little thought along these lines can make your pages much more appealing to your visitors. Before you begin creating your Web site, choose the right look and feel and a style of presentation that is appropriate for your audience. Include links that your visitors find interesting, not just the ones that you find interesting - unless that's the point of your page, of course. In addition to using good sites as models, research other media, such as newspapers and magazines - the articles and the ads - that have an audience similar to yours, to find good and bad examples.