16 January 2007

Your website 101

When you start building websites it is very easy to be seduced by Flash, Javascript and other graphic. And frames are such fun- they will surely ease navigation for your visitors. Wrong, and a waste of your skills!
Don't make these common website blunders! Visitors come to your site for a reason - make it easy for them to get what they want. Here are a few tips ...
1. Do not Use Flash unless you must. Visitors come to your site looking for information, not for an in-your-face Flash movie. Annoy them and it only takes a simple click of the mouse before they're gone forever. Flash requires users to download a plug-in, if they don't already have it. It can chew up your machine's resources and make it impossible to get out - even a 'Skip Intro' link is hard to click on if your computer is too involved with Flash! And it takes too long to load. Not everyone has a high-speed modem!
2. Use Graphics Sparingly. A picture can say a thousand words. But don't use graphics for the sake of using them; unless they convey something specific and relevant to your site then you might as well leave them off.
How many times have you come across an agonizingly slow site, filled with images dancing, whirling, bouncing, and beckoning to you from the screen? It's irritating to say the least.
If you have to display a lot of graphics on one page, make them into thumbnails. Visitors can click on the image they want to see in order to view the full-sized version.
Also be sure you compress your images to make them as small as possible, and specify the image WIDTH and HEIGHT in your HTML tag.
3. Forget the Frames. Search engines cannot read frames properly, and improperly designed frames can leave your visitor 'trapped'.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home