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Webpage Facts

WEB PAGE DESIGN
Some Basic Facts

Here are a a few points when designing webpage you should want to bear in mind (also check out our design links).

Plan your page in advance
Have a think about what your page should look like should look like & what you want to get across
 
Who do you want to get things across to ? There is no point in having some large hi -tech flash plug in on a page with text based information for college tutorials where a simple page would work better. However the reverse could be true of page on a site devoted to games
 
 
Watch the length of your pages
This is from 2 angles size in download time and length of your page.
If your graphic and animation heavy Homepage is going to take 2 hours to download, people on the whole will give it a big body swerve. Rethinking the need to have 20 Hi res .jpegs of your cat and all of Beethoven's fifth as the background sound!!!
(Frontpage express users have an advantage here. Keep an eye on the time box in the right lower corner)
 
Try dividing your pages up ( we've broken most of the topic areas down via menus). If you need to put 20 .jpegs of your cat on your site perhaps put it on a separate page and warn people before the access it (e.g.. Click here but graphic intensive)
Secondly watch the length of your pages. Research (and common sense!!) tells us most people get a tad bored by constantly scrolling down a page. Again try breaking pages up If you can't or won't break them up, use menus in some form to allow people to jump to target areas and don't forget links to the topto top of page
 
Watch The width
(....Or some monitors are bigger than others
- Apologies to 'The Smiths')
One thing that's definitely more annoying than scrolling down is scrolling across.
Your page might well fit on your 17" monitor at 1024 X 768 res but many people (esp in business or academia) are still using 14" monitors at 640 X 480 res.

640 X
480
1024 X 768

There are 2 upshots of this. Firstly on some pages your viewers could end up having to scroll over to see whole page. And secondly because of the warp round nature of browsers, your layout could be drastically altered

The easiest solution is to enclose your displayed information in a table cell with a set width of 600 pixels
The same applies to printing, The average A4 print out is around 540 wide (the astute of you will have noticed that our menu pages are 590 wide and the longer text pages in the region of 525 wide we added a gutter on the right
Copyright
Watch this.

You wouldn't want someone nicking your ideas, would you?
And you don't want to end up in court on a copyright charge.

If you use some else's images or text check in advance check with them first. to top of page
 
 
Preview!!!
Check it before you upload to the server.. Check it once you've loaded it up. Get a friend to check it. Check it periodically to see links work........ ad nauseam.

Make sure you use more than one browser.
 
Watch your fonts & Multimedia file types
No good using your superslinkyspot font if only 100 machines in the world use it (other will see it replaced by a a default font and this may alter the whole appearance of your site). For the body of your text try sticking to common fonts like times new roman, arial, verdana etc. If you need to use fancy fonts in you page titles turn them into logo image files such as .gifs then all will be able to see them

Same applies for files types such as sounds or plug ins. Stick to commonly used standards and always have a link included so people can down load any required player or plug-in
 
 
 
Have fun
Most important. Remember everyone makes mistakes, it is all a learning processto top of page

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