About Internet and Web Design

Posts Tagged ‘Making’

A money making world wide web business ( Real World wide web Income ) isn’t really that much different than a traditional real world company. Both start with a dream and a plan and both need certain elements to be successful. Most businesses change in the first couple of years because of demand of capital. There just wasn’t enough money invested in the venture or the money wasn’t appropriately managed. Businesses might also change because of demand of knowledge or experience.

A money making world wide web business is more likely to be successful if the entrepreneur invests an appropriate amount of capital based on a solid budget and if the venture generates a positive cash flow. The entrepreneur is more likely to be successful if he chooses a venture that stems from his individualized knowledge, education, and professional experience. No venture is absolutely immune from outside economic and market forces, but a savvy entrepreneur will pay attention to such possibilities and plan ways to help the business survive the rough times.

An entrepreneur actually has three choices when it comes to launching a new venture.

She can open a physical location, such as a retail store or an office that offers professional expertise, such as in bookkeeping or real estate. A second option is to launch a money making world wide web business by purchasing a domain study and setting up a website that offers either products or services. The third option is to do both establish a physical location that is supported or integrated with a well-designed website.

This third option is so important that even established businesses are finding it necessary in today’s online-centered world to create websites that promote their products and services, wage information such as the address of the physical location and hours of operation, and perhaps informs potential shoppers about upcoming income or special offers.

By incorporating an online presence into a strategic marketing plan, traditional companies have the potential to expand consumer base and increase income revenue. Those who ignore the world wide web phenomenon might find themselves sharing the fate of uninspired nineteenth century carriage makers, bemoaning their fate and wondering what went wrong.

Of course, not each entrepreneur wants to establish a traditional business and not each entrepreneur is looking for overnight wealth. The money making world wide web business phenomenon has opened a broad and easily accessible path for a multitude of individuals to acquire an income without the overhead expenses of a traditional store or office. These micro-companies who might never have found the niche customers for their one-of-a-kind products with traditional advertising methods now have a way to promote them throughout the world with very tiny cost. They might not become millionaires selling items that fit in a small niche, but they have an opportunity that didn’t exist before the world wide web revolution took place. Other people establish a money making world wide web business offering products with broad appeal. These entrepreneurs work hard to set up distribution channels and shipping avenues. They hire employees to keep the company website current, to fill orders, and wage top-notch customer service. With both these examples, though, the entrepreneur’s success is built on a foundation of knowledge and expertise. People with passion find fulfillment worth more than riches. Tapping that passion is much more rewarding than a get-rich-scheme.

The world wide web revolution has provided opportunities for many with imagination, passion, and persistence. But be assured that it also has opened the way for the unscrupulous to trap the unwary in money-stealing schemes promising overnight riches, but that deliver tiny or nothing. These sites can be recognized by the use of extravagant hype and continued pleas to purchase now. Some websites promise to expose money making world wide web business scams and yet they use these same techniques of excessive customer testimonials (which might or not be true) and “trust me” language. Aspiring entrepreneurs are well-advised to stay away from such websites when researching legitimate business opportunities. Instead, they should take a hard look at their own skills, hobbies, passions and experiences, especially if the dream is to make a full-time income from the potential online company. A coin collector might find success as an online coin dealer, particularly if the website also contains relevant and helpful information to other coin collectors and hobbyists. A gardening expert might find success offering vintage flower seeds, hand-painted pottery, and message boards for other enthusiasts on her website.

Of course, there are opportunities that are one-of-a-kind to the online world. For example, a web designer has an excellent opportunity to open an online shop selling his services to other entrepreneurs. Web-hosting and online marketing firms exist only because the world wide web itself exists. Additionally, there are people who aren’t looking for a full-time money making world wide web business. Stay-at-home mothers and retired people, for example, often seek opportunities to bring extra income into the household. They might acquire that extra income by tapping into affiliate programs, establishing an website with ads geared to a specific topic, writing and selling ebooks, or perhaps offering some type of product or service. The bottom line is that a legitimate money making world wide web business requires the same forethought and planning as any other legitimate business. Those who plan before launching into a venture are the ones with the greatest likelihood of meeting their individualized goals and objectives.

What is web publishing?

What are the goals of your site?

 

Is the goal to entertain, to wage information or graphics, or to wage some one-of-a-kind service? Or, perhaps, it’s something other than this!

If it’s for a business, are you trying to grab the attention of new customers, give information about products and services, do market research, or wage customer support? Do you also intend to highlight your after income service?

How does the design and implementation of your web site support your goals?

 

For commercial sites

If your site is a commercial site, most of the surfers will go to your site with an intention to get information. They won’t be there for “a total web experience,” or to be entertained, or for the thrill of visiting a “Fabulous web site.”

They’ll want to know things like:

“What options are acquirable and what do they cost?”

“What are the features of your products and services?”

“How can I contact your company?”

“Where and how can I buy your products?”

“Do you have a range of products or services?”

A commercial web site is a significant link of your company and, in some cases; it will be the prime option in which your customers and others interact with you in the future.

During the infant stage of the web many companies wanted to “just have a web presence” so they turned to graphics, advertising agencies, and the new generation of web design firms. Even though these firms had a good background in graphic arts, most of them were quite novice in the ball game of creating web sites. They over-emphasized the graphics aspect and tried to entertain in the same way as print ads or television commercials.

However, an effective web site needs a lot more than this. It should begin with a stipulations definition that evaluates the real needs of the company and how they can saint be served through the web. This should be followed by a careful design and planning stage. The next phase is to build and test the site.

But the pitfall here is that a web site needs continuous updating and maintenance to sustain and stay in tune with the times. A lot of sites are designed in a way that unsuccessful to adhere to these aspects. You also have to think about the operations aspects of the site, such as guaranteeing response time and availability.

If you plan to build a web site that really makes sense, you should think about engaging the services of a systems architect before you contact the graphics companies or hire those Java programmers. An architect will plan your site as a system designed to meet your corporate goals, rather than just a bunch of interconnected HTML pages.

Make your site simple to navigate

Give serious thoughts to the roadmap of your site and how its different elements are linked. How is this navigational information conveyed to the user?

Could someone, after visiting your site, draw a simple diagram showing how the different elements are connected and how you get from one place to another?

If someone comes to your site looking for a specific piece of information, how simple is it to locate it?

How does a visitor figure out all of the things they can see or do at your site?

How does a visitor figure out how to navigate your particular site?

How can the visitor tell if they have seen everything?

How can a visitor tell what they have and have not seen?

Make it simple for a visitor to determine what is new and when things were changed.

A site that is difficult to navigate will also be difficult to maintain.

Complexity will limit the size of your site.

Complexity will make it difficult to test your site.

 

Some tips to generate repeat visitors to your site:

Make it massive enough to require more than one visit to view the entire site. But make it simple to remember what the visitor has already seen by avoiding complex design.

Change your site often. But make it simple for the visitor to figure out what was changed, and when.

Make your site a source of reference material – a list, an index, a database. Perhaps allowing the individual to search it for a particular topic or item.

Make your site an trusty and reliable source on a particular subject.

In the world of the web, apiece visitor is different

Remember that there are great variations in the individualized platform, display setup, processor and disk speed, connection speed, and the particular browser software being used by apiece individual visitor to your web site. And the visitors themselves will be different, in apiece conceivable way.

Don’t adopt that apiece visitor to your site has the latest hardware and software, a super-speed connection to the Internet, and the eyesight and reflexes of an energetic young teenager!

There will be a great variation in how your site looks to different users if you rely on fancy HTML gimmicks.
There will be a great variation in how your site looks to different users even if you don’t use fancy HTML gimmicks!

You have to decide whether the goal of your site is to impress those special few with your technical razzle-dazzle, or to make it a site for the enjoyment of masses.
Don’t create a site that caters to the choose few of the total visitors you are targeting.

As a result of heavy World wide web traffic, web pages bloated with gratuitous graphics, older hardware or software, a clean number of folks are surfing the web with the graphics turned off in their browsers. What does your site look like without its graphics?

You are going to lose a lot of points if you mention Netscape (or Microsoft), in any way, on the first page that your visitors see. This includes describing your site as “Netscape-enhanced,” telling your visitors that your site is only presentable if they have the latest version of Netscape, or pointing to a site where they can download the latest version of Netscape. Think of the message that it sends about you and your site. Think also of the first impression your web site leaves among the first time visitors.

How does your site look with Lynx? Try it and you’ll see how your site looks with a text-only viewer. This might be the only viewer that a Unix individual will have, especially in foreign countries. If your site is mainly informational, don’t deny access to these potential visitors.

And you had superior prepare yourself for the invasion of the surfers who will reach your site through add-ons to their television set, telegram box, or plug-in for their game playing machine. These new widgets will have limited capabilities, very much like the primeval versions of the more favourite browsers.

The major online services have well over 10 million paying customers. Very soon, most of them will have web browsers, but they won’t be the very, very latest version of Netscape. Your pages might look very strange to them.

The people with money to spend do not have time to fool with getting a SLIP or PPP connection running. And they don’t have time to get and tune the latest version of Netscape (when they hear the word “upgrade,” they most likely think of moving to the First Class section).

They will most likely be using browsers that are integrated into a full-featured online service that provides a single package with news, stock portfolio tracking, and a seamless interface to the World wide web and the web.

The real point is that if you have a commercial web site, you can keep Netscape around for testing, but make sure it also works with whatever browser is provided by AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy.

 

The individual interface

 

When the Macintosh first came out, Apple published a set of individual interface guidelines for software developers. Some developers felt that having to adhere to a standard interface would hamper their creativity. But others realized that it would actually free them to spend more time applying their creativity to step up to the next level of application design.

Consider the signal-to-noise ratio of your interface. How much is useful and interesting, and how much is just noise? Avoid using massive or unnecessary graphics that don’t add to the content of the page.

Remember that browsers have a lot of user-configurable features — colors, fonts, etc. These can really mess up your fancy interface.

Don’t make the individual confuse where to click.

Don’t replace bullets and horizontal rules with images. It eats bandwidth and confuses the user. If you use images as bullets, your visitors might try clicking on them and wonder why nothing happens.

Be very careful in using graphic elements as controls (buttons, links, etc). The individual has to guess what to do.

Try not to have two or more places to click that perform the same action.

Don’t use the “underline” attribute for text. It makes it look like a clickable link.

Find out what your visitors do most often at your site and make that the easiest thing to do. If you’re into intricate jewelry or gemstones embedded jewelry and most of your visitors are there to have a closer and sharper look at your samples, have a huge button that states “Get a closer look.” This is a good rule to follow when determining the size and placement of interface elements.

For some reason, most browsers switch to a grey background by default. The easiest way to fix this is to override the browser’s default. Use a white background.
Don’t forget that links show up in different colors than regular text, and might change color after a link is viewed. Think about how these links will show up against a colored background. (And remember that these colors will be different on different browsers and can also be changed by the user.)

You can use a shade of gray as a background if you are not displaying text against it. A lighter shade is advisable.
Keep the interface uniform. Have the same controls perform the same action everywhere.

Avoid putting too many interface elements on the same page. Some sites present the visitor with a bewildering array of image maps, buttons, text links, and images to click on. Don’t use colored, textured, or graphic backgrounds unless totally necessary. They might look fine in your browser, but could end up looking quite different in someone else’s browser, or on a individualized with different video hardware, color depth, etc. They’re distracting, and they really do make text illegible at times.
Another problem with backgrounds is that they are handled differently by different browsers. On some, your page is first displayed, and then, after some delay, the background suddenly shows up, like a layer of smog descending on the page. With other browsers, you sit and watch a blank page until the background has been downloaded.

Displaying images against anything but a plain background might cause them to be rendered incorrectly by the browser. And it might make it difficult for a visitor to view them. You must have noticed that in Art galleries the paintings are place with a light background so that the picture comes out well in the eyes of the viewers. Don’t blink anything unless it’s to indicate an emergency such as a life hazard. It’s distracting, and it is quite irritating for the surfer. Try to read something over here while something over there is blinking. It disturbs the attention of the viewer.

Don’t use tricky (or undocumented) HTML to do dissolves or fades or other special effects. They look different on apiece machine. And after a while, they can get downright annoying. And they might stop working (or work strangely) on different browsers or on new releases of your current browser.

Don’t have something that, when clicked on, takes the visitor back to the page they’re already on. Disorienting. This is common on sites where apiece page has links to apiece page.

One way to get a precise block of type, such as a study and address, to appear correctly in apiece browser is to render the type in an art program, then save it as an image (GIF) file. If done properly, a name-and-address block, including email and web addresses, should be about 2K bytes. (But don’t forget to include a text alternate.)

You can set massive (headline) type, normally black, to a shade of gray. But not too light.

Don’t change any of the type colors — either for displayed text or for links. It only disorients the user.

In general, try and keep the individual interface simple and uncluttered. Try and use default values whenever possible.

The tiny red light

Every web browser has one.

It’s a tiny indicator that turns red when the browser starts to load a page. After all the items on the page have been downloaded successfully, the tiny red light turns off.

This is especially useful when the web is slow, or when the page is complex. It lets you know when you actually have everything. A very useful element of the browser’s interface.

Unfortunately, there are a number of widgets (like animated images) that you can add to your page that keep the red light from working properly. The one most often came across is the animated GIF.

With one of these widgets on your page the tiny red light never goes out. And, as a result, it looks like your page is still loading, even though it might actually have finished. Now the visitor has lost the use of part of the browser’s interface, and has to guess whether the page is complete. Or perhaps move for the rest of it. Or perhaps give up and move on.

Hint: If the tiny red light doesn’t go out after your page has loaded, it’s a sign that there’s something on your page that will annoy people.

Use color wisely

Use color to convey information or to draw attention to where it’s really needed.

The standard web interface uses this principle by displaying the hypertext links to other pages in colors that stand out from the rest of the text. In addition, different colors are used to show which links have been visited and which haven’t.

So strong are these clues, that you can look at a web page and tell a lot about it without reading the text.

It’s also a good reason for leaving the text and links in their default colors. Your visitors will have seen hundreds of pages with the text and links in their default colors and will take advantage of this conditioning by being healthy to navigate a new site without having to constantly relearn the interface.

It’s obvious that if you change the color of the links on your site, or use an image map, much of the doable information will be lost to the visitor and your site will be more difficult to navigate.

Remember, also, that some of your visitors are color blind. At its worst, colors are varying shades of grey. Colored text against a colored background could show up as a grey smudge. Take this into statement when you design your pages.

Other visitors, with less-than-perfect vision, might have trouble viewing images and text with strongly contrasting colors (like red text on a blue background). Don’t make your page so that it can only be viewed by teenagers.

Image maps

Avoid putting image maps on your pages unless you have a really good reason for using them. Fancy image maps can be far more confusing than a well-formatted text list or a simple set of buttons.

In many cases, it’s hard to tell just where to click. This is especially true if the map contains both images and words. And since the words are not underlined, it’s hard to tell if they’re links.

Image maps take up a lot of bandwidth and, in most cases, add nothing to your page.

If you use a massive image map, your visitors might have to move for well over a minute before they can begin to navigate your site.

Unlike regular text links, which change color after being clicked on, image maps give no clue about what’s been seen and what hasn’t. This makes it more difficult for the individual to navigate your site.

Image maps limit you to a very simple site. It’s difficult to include more than a few items in the map, especially if you are including both icons and text in the map.

The time and effort it takes to alter both the image and the map make the use of image maps a real maintenance headache. It will take far longer to update or change your site if it means modifying the image maps as well. This is especially true if you have used image maps on many of your pages.

If you use an image map, make sure that you include a text list with same items for those who are confused by your map or are using a browser where images are not being loaded. Locate this substitute list as close to the image map as doable to refrain confusion. Make sure that the list contains all the items on the map, and that they are in the same order.

If your image map is a figure that depicts something real, like a map of the India, USA or Germany, don’t presuppose that your visitors will be healthy to refer things (Which one is Hamburg or Scotland?) solely by their shape or location.

Also, make sure that your image map gives some sort of a warning if the visitor clicks in an area that doesn’t relate to anything or isn’t defined in the map’s table. (What happens if the visitor clicks in the ocean, next to India?)

Your page’s title

Don’t forget to place a title on apiece one of your web pages. The title is what shows up at the top of the browser’s window when a page is displayed. If your page doesn’t have a title, the browser will display “Untitled,” or “No Title,” or simply the URL of the page, or perhaps nothing.

The title is important. If someone bookmarks your page, the title is what shows up in their list of bookmarks. Or, if someone puts a link to your site on their page, they’ll probably use your page title as the link text. Or, if the page is indexed by a search engine, the title is what shows up in the search results. You get the picture.

Even if you do have titles on your pages you still might want to reevaluate the actual wording. Make sure that the title actually states something. Instead of “My Web Page,” how about: “Bud Spencer — My Web page?” Envision viewing the two of them in a bookmark list.

If you have a business site, you might want to go even further. For instance, you might want to place the study of your business (or an abbreviation) in the title of apiece page on your site. You never know which of your pages will be bookmarked, and it will be far easier to pick you out in a list of bookmarks, or any other list that uses the page’s title.

And don’t forget to tell people about yourself and your activities on the main page of your site. Don’t make them guess. For example: “Splendid tours & travels is a travel home delivering domestic as well as international package tours to Europe and Far East”.

The width of the browser’s window

Imagine you’re an art director and you have to design an advertisement for a number of media cars like newspapers, magazines, tabloids etc. Now all these different media require different column sizes for your advertisement. Sounds crazy? How would you design such an ad?

Yet this is one of the biggest problems covering web page designers. The height of the browser’s window has very tiny effect on how your page is displayed — you just see more or less of it, sort of like a window shade. But as the width of the browser window changes, it can have a spectacular effect on how your page is displayed.

This is because the browser will try to rearrange the web page to make maximum use of the acquirable browser width.

Two factors determine the width of the browser’s window — the width of the visitor’s screen, which determines the maximum width for the browser, and the proportion of the screen that the browser has been set to.

The practical width of individualized screens varies from about 640 to 1280 pixels. This is determined by hardware, software, and the display settings the individual has chosen. Your web page should work properly with the browser window set >anywhere

There are a number of different elements on your page, but they begin into two groups: those items that can be adjusted in width, and those that can’t.

Items that can be adjusted in width are text (which can wrap) and tables and cells (if declared as a percentage of the window’s width).

Items whose width is fixed are images, text given a “NOWRAP” attribute, text within PRE tags, and tables or cells declared as fixed (pixel) width.

Say you design your page for the middle of the browser range — about 800 pixels wide. What happens when your page is viewed at other browser widths?

Let’s begin with a narrower window. If the page is designed with the right mix of fixed and variable elements, the page should still work. You might want to use a plateau with multiple columns where the leftmost is fixed width and the others variable width. If fixed-width elements are used, the page might end up wider than the browser and a horizontal scrollbar will appear at the bottom of the window. Now the visitor will have to scroll left and right to see your page.

If the window is wider than you designed for, a number of things can happen. If you’ve used an image as a background for your page, and it just fits your medium-sized window, it will repeat as the browser adds another copy to the right in order to fill out the increased width. Tables declared as variable width might be rendered strangely, with elements showing up in unexpected places.

In addition, the way a particular browser juggles your page to fit its width will vary greatly with different browsers. And also with different versions of the same browser.

Obviously, a certain amount of testing and experimentation will be necessary to make sure that your pages display properly at all browser width settings.

A Tip

Keep your home/main page small so that it loads swiftly – state 10 seconds would be the saint time. (Especially important when the web slows down.) This will hook the visitor. Think twice about putting that 90K GIF on your home page. Remember that yours is only one of millions of sites — web surfers have short attention spans.

Images

Don’t present high calibre images such as art or photographs against a background that is textured or darker colored. Stick to white, a light shade of grey or, if you must use a colored background, use the lighter shades.
Don’t use an image compression technique that isn’t supported by all browsers. At the present time, GIF and JPEG formats are universally recognized.

A JPEG image might compress to a smaller file than a GIF, taking less time to download, but it might take longer to decompress and display, thus making your effort for naught. This is especially true on older, slower machines.

JPEG compression also imposes a loss of image quality, which might (depending on the settings in your image-conversion program, and your visitor’s hardware) be quite noticeable. But JPEG compression will probably give the saint results with photographs or other images with lots of colors or fine detail.

With drawings or line art work, the GIF can actually end up smaller than the JPEG. With line art, a GIF might appear sharper than a JPEG since there is no loss of calibre in GIF format. However, GIF images can only show a limited range of colors, and might not be suitable for images such as color photographs.

The saint option is to try both compression techniques for apiece of your images and see which gives the smallest file size, the saint image quality, and the saint performance in downloading and viewing.

And don’t forget to design your pages so that they still are usable if a visitor has the image loading turned off. Use the “Alt” attribute to wage text alternatives for your images.

Interlaced GIFs

Don’t use interlaced GIFs. These give the effect of the image being continuously redrawn at a higher and higher resolution. The files for these images are actually larger than for the equivalent GIF, and take more time to load.

The effect is annoying and it’s hard to tell when the picture is actually ready to be viewed. It’s especially annoying when used to render fine artwork. It’s also annoying when the web is slow and the image sits half-rendered for a period of time. You might also find that the intermediate image resembles something very different from the actual image. It’s just another special effect that will soon be boring.

Animated Images

Avoid using animated images on your page. They make the page load slower — they use huge files, slowing down the loading and viewing of the rest of the page. Your page might just sit there for a considerable time, totally blank, while the first animated image loads.

Because they have much larger file sizes than regular images, animated images take away a lot more of the Internet’s precious bandwidth. It adds in slowing down the web. Animated images cause the page to load improperly — the tiny red light on the browser doesn’t go out, so there’s no way to tell if the page has completed loading. If the visitor clicks the ‘Stop’ button, it might turn out that the page hasn’t fully loaded, so it has to be loaded again. They can also keep you from being healthy to scroll the page while it’s loading.

They’re distracting and annoying, making it harder for the visitor to concentrate on the other things on your page. (It is quite disturbing reading something over here while an animated mailbox is flipping opens and closes over there.)

And even though it might look adorable the first time you see one, after you’ve seen it repeatedly again and again, you feel like smashing the screen sometimes!
And if you switch to another application, the browser now sits in the background, chewing up processor cycles doing animation.

The animation runs at different speeds, depending on the visitor’s hardware, and what else it’s doing at the same time — crawling on slower machines, and flickering between images on fast machines.

And lastly, a number of folks have reported browser crashes on leaving a page that had an animated image. When the browser crashes, it can mess up things like the browser’s history list, tables of cached items, and your bookmarks file.

Standalone Images

 

The most common use of standalone images is on a page with a lot of tiny images where clicking on one of them loads a larger version. If you just link to the image file, it ends up in the upper left corner of the browser window, all by itself.

Use an HTML page to hold the image. This will let you center the picture and place in a page title and other information.

 

Text

If you’re presenting text documents on your pages, give some thought to making them simple to read.

The viewing area of your browser is much smaller than a normal printed page, so you might have to reformat your documents to fit this new environment, rather than just dropping an existing document into your HTML editor.

Don’t run text the full width of the screen. This creates long lines of text that are difficult to read. Text also needs air around it, to breathe. That’s why most printed documents have margins.

You can easily solve these problems by using the “Block quote” tag, which gives a margin on both sides of the page. You can nest Block quotes to vary the width as necessary.

You can use tables to create more complex text layouts such as columns.

You can use dictionary lists (’DL’) as a simple way of formatting text that requires indentation.

Don’t use long paragraphs of text. It’s hard to read this in printed form and, for some reason, even harder on to read on a individualized screen. Try to keep paragraphs to four sentences or less.

If you specify a text font other than the default, make sure that the font (or its equivalent) is one that is standard on your visitors’ computers. And when specifying one of these fonts, don’t forget to specify the equivalent font obloquy for other operating systems and hardware platforms as well.

And try not to place links in your text, especially in the middle of a sentence or paragraph. If you have links that relate to your text, place them at the end, like footnotes. Give your visitors a chance to read your text before sending them somewhere else.

Tables

Learn how to use tables and you will be healthy to perfectly control the look of your web pages. Tables let you break your page into precise segments and control the placement of graphics and text.

You can use tables to create columns and grids to contain the images and text. You can even use tables within tables to create sub-sections that can be treated as a unit. Table cells can be filled with color to add contrast to parts of the page. Whenever you see a page that looks like a entrepot or a newspaper, you can be sure that the structure is based on tables.

Tables can be used as templates or style sheets to impose a uniform look on a web site. And tables can give you some of the functionality of frames, but without the headaches.

There are several ways to learn how to use tables. The easiest way is by studying table-based sites on the web. Any book that covers page layout theory and technique, such as used in newspaper or magazine, will give you some guidance in understanding the aesthetic issues involved. Go to the “Graphic Arts” section of your local library, book store, or art supply store and look for a book on the subject of page layout. Try to find one that utilizes the “grid” method.

Some problems came across in using tables:

If your page is based on tables in might load more slowly than a page without tables. This is because the browser has to do a lot of calculations to figure out how to place all the items that are in the table. In addition, the browser might not display the plateau until all the text and graphic items have been downloaded.

You can speed this up in several ways. If the plateau is very long (more than several screens high) try breaking it into smaller tables, one above the other. Using tables this way will also make it easier to rearrange the elements on the page. Also, make sure that the height and width is specified for all the images in the table. Doing this will grant the browser to size the plateau before it gets all the images.

Even though tables are part of the primeval HTML standards, there are still differences in the way that they are displayed by different browsers. Getting your tables to display correctly in all the favourite browsers can be a challenge. For instance, some browsers won’t display a colored cell unless there is text or an image in it. Others might vary in how they display nested tables or tables stacked one above the other.

So, as you develop your table-based pages, test them continuously with a variety of browsers. It will save from unpleasant surprises further down the line.

Another challenge is determining which parts of the plateau to make fixed-width (defined in pixels) and which parts to make variable (defined as a percentage of the current browser width). With a variable width table, the horizontal dimensions of the plateau readjust as you change the browser width.

The trade-off is that fixed width guarantees the final appearance more tightly, but the variable width can take superior advantage if the browser has a larger width. In some cases, the optimum results are with a combination of fixed and variable width for the different parts of the table. Again, a certain amount of experimentation is required to find the optimum balance. Make sure that you test your table-based page at different browser widths.

Tables are one area where most WYSIWYG web page editors have problems. The editor’s display can vary greatly from what you see in the browser, especially with complex or nested tables. If you download a trial version of one of these editors, make sure you check the accuracy of how it displays tables.

As mentioned in the section on printing, tables will affect how your web pages print out.

Tables might also affect how your web page scrolls within the browser. Depending on the particular browser, the page might jump rather than scrolling smoothly.

Frames

Don’t use frames just to establish that you know how to use frames.

Your web page is small to begin with, and carving it up with frames can reduce the usable area to a tiny fraction of the screen. Some visitors will have browsers that can’t see frames, so you’ll have to maintain two versions of your site.

Don’t build your site around frames. It makes it difficult to navigate and limits you to having a very simple site. The cursor keys don’t work unless you click in the frame you want to scroll, and the browser’s ‘Back’ button might produce unexpected results.

And there’s also a good chance that a visitor’s attempt to print out your page will end in failure.

And an interesting surprise awaits the visitor who tries to bookmark one of the pages within your site. (They’ll just get the URL of your main page.)

And you might get unexpected results when a search engine indexes your site. Visitors who come to one of your pages from a search engine won’t be entering through the site’s front door and won’t see the frame that would normally be holding the page.

And if your “framed” site has links to other sites, they’ll show up within your frame, masking the indistinguishability of the other site and confusing visitors, who’ll wonder where they really are. And you won’t be healthy to bookmark the linked-to site.

In addition, there might be copyright issues involved if another site shows up within the frame of your site. In any case, it’s certainly unfair to the other site.

And if there’s a problem with one of your framed pages, it’ll be difficult to report since only the URL of the main page is displayed.

Frames also cause problems when the browser is called from another application. State that you’re reading an email and someone has sent you a message which includes a link to a web site. You double-click on the link and now the browser becomes the front window and begins to load the page. If the last thing you were looking at in the browser was a frame-based site, guess what happens?

You can get some of the functionality of frames, without the complexity, by using tables to lay out your pages.

One doable use for frames is if you have a report where you want to lock the row or column titles so they don’t scroll off the screen.

Java and Javascript

A lot of people are learning how to program in Java and JavaScript. Most of their primeval efforts seem to be some form of nonstop, repetitive animation that is both annoying and distracting. Some applets keep the page from loading or scrolling properly.

One favourite applet overwrites the browser’s position display at the bottom of the window, keeping you from viewing the destinations of the links as you move the cursor over them. It also keeps you from seeing the position of the current page as it is loading.

Another favourite use for Java is to open a smaller secondary window above the browser. This might establish to be disorienting if your visitors are not ready for it.

If you are developing Java applets, you might wish to move until you have something more worthwhile before inflicting your primeval efforts on unsuspecting visitors.

If you make your site so that it can only be viewed with Java or JavaScript enabled browsers, you’re making a huge mistake. An even larger mistake is to make two versions of your site — one for Java, and one without it!

What will the visitor whose browser does not support Java see at your site? Perhaps an interesting message that the site requires Java. What about the visitor with a Java-capable browser, but with Java disabled? Perhaps a dialog box with an interesting error message.

Some other considerations. Only a fraction of your visitors will have Java-capable browsers. You can test for which browser they’re using (and maintain several versions of your site), but some will be using Java-capable browsers with Java turned off due to security concerns. In this case, they might get an interesting error message from the browser’s JavaScript interpreter.

When your pages are indexed by search engines, they also take an excerpt from the beginning of the page. If the first thing on your page is a lump of JavaScript code, then this is what the search engine will show as the description of your page. Perhaps not what you had in mind.

If, however, you are designing a web-based application to be used on a private Intranet, you might have a valid reason for using one of these new technologies.

 

Hard Copy

What do the pages on your site look like when they are printed out? Try it. You might be in for a surprise.

You might want hard copy because it makes it easier to design and edit your pages. Just like an advertising layout.

It gives co-workers and customers a way to view and comment on your pages. You can print out information rather than writing it down.

Your visitors can print out a hard copy of the information on your site for later reference.

If you’re using tables to control the layout of your page, they will also have an effect on printing. You can add some control to how the pages print. When printing, the browser might begin a new page if a plateau won’t fit on the current page (just as it would with an image). Judicious use of tables can force page breaks when the document prints out. But be sure to test this with different browsers.

If your browser has a “Page Preview” option, you can use this to get a preliminary intent of how your pages will print.

If your page has a lot of browser-specific code, it might not print out properly if the visitor has a different browser.

If your page has a black or colored background, it might not print properly.

If your page uses an image for the background, it will probably print without the background.

If your page uses frames, it probably won’t print correctly.

But the biggest surprise awaits those whose ultra-chic pages have black or dark backgrounds with white or light-colored text.

Should you use the latest features?

Each new browser has new HTML tags that it supports. Some are upgrades to the latest HTML standard. Some are proprietary tags for features supported only by this particular browser.

For some, the allure of a new technical challenge is too much to resist. So, instantly the web starts to blossom with pages that use these new features.

Before you begin cranking out your new pages, here are some things to consider:

1. Do you absolutely, positively need this new feature for your site, or are you just using it to show off?

2. Which browsers are compatible with this feature?

3. What percentage of your visitors will be using these browsers? Is it worth implementing this feature for only a choose few of your visitors?
4. What happens with browsers that don’t support these new tags, or with the right browser, but with the new feature disabled by the user? What will these visitors see?

5. Will you need special versions of your pages with code to handle different browsers?

6. Will you have to maintain several versions of your site in order to support all your visitors?

About HTML

The easiest way to learn HTML is by studying the source from other people’s pages. Most browsers will get the HTML source for the page you’re looking at. It’s also a good way to learn what makes bad pages bad.

Be careful about using new or specialized HTML features. They might not be upward compatible with the newer browsers or new versions of HTML. And it will be a very long time until your visitors have upgraded to a browser that supports these features.

Avoid using browser-specific “enhancements” that only work with one particular make or version of browser.

Use the totally smallest set of HTML that will do the job. Make this something you can brag about, rather than how you mastered the fancy commands.

Don’t use undocumented HTML effects to do things such as dissolves or fades. This might stop working in the next release of the particular browser you’re designing it for, and might cause some other browsers to function incorrectly.

Never forget that HTML is not a page description language or page formatting language. It is for displaying information and graphics, and for interacting with the user.

Use as many defaults as possible, Override them only when necessary, such as to set the background color to white, or to center an image.

But the saint way to use HTML is not to use it. The newest WYSIWYG web page editors let you place together web pages without coding directly in HTML. It’s like using a word processor. Most of them also have a way of viewing and editing the underlying HTML code so experienced users can still have control over the fine points.

It’s like advancing from assembly language to a high-level language like BASIC. The WYSIWYG editors take care of the annoying details and free you to work at a higher level. In addition, these editors will automatically take care of a lot of the housekeeping for you, like specifying the height and width of all the images so that your page loads faster.

Most of the WYSIWYG web page editors are still in the WYSINQWYG (What You See Is Not Quite What You Get) stage, and some produce more HTML than an optimized, hand-coded page. But the extra text they produce adds tiny to the download time of a page, and you can be sure that the page won’t have any HTML errors in it. (If you’re really interested in how fast your page loads, how about dumping one of those animated GIFs?)

Advertising

Advertising has come to the web. You will definitely rope in some client that pays you by advertising on your page?

There is a dual benefit by getting paid advertisements on your site. It proves that your site has more visibility and reach among the surfers and it also gets you more revenue in turn.

But while other advertising media are aimed at influencing your next purchase, web ads have a totally different goal — to get a visitor to leave your web page and go to the advertiser’s site. (You only get paid if someone leaves your page and goes to the advertiser’s page.) You can be sure that the designers of the ads will try their very saint to get folks to leave your page (and probably not return).

But that’s not all. You might not have any state about what the advertisement states or about the subject matter. Or even worse, what the ad does. Imagine, someone else’s animated image on your page. Hmm… Wonder why your page doesn’t load correctly any more.

A massive ad at the top of your page might create a certain amount of confusion as to the actual ownership of the site. And since this is probably the first thing that loads, it’s probably the first thing a visitor will see.

If you have a commercial site, you’re going to look pretty silly with an ad for another company on your pages, especially when the goal of that ad is to get visitors to leave your site. Some might wonder why your company can’t afford to pay for its own web site.

And don’t forget the free ads that many sites carry. Sort of like paying extra for clothing that displays the designer’s study in massive letters. Most of these free ads are for the latest browsers or plug-in components that you totally must have to view the site properly. Others have created “awards” that you can use to decorate your page. Remember that they’re also links to someone else’s site.

Is anyone getting rich from letting others place an ad on their page? Only a few of the most hit sites. For the rest of us, it’s just another “get rich online” gimmick.

Testing and debugging

In the real world of individualized systems development, some think about testing to be the most important phase. In the world of the web, it doesn’t seem to have the same importance. Look at the many web pages with glaring errors such as missing images and non-working links.

If your web page editor has a spelling checker, use it. If it doesn’t, find another way to check the spelling.

Test your pages with several different browsers. You will be astonished at the variations in interpreting even the simplest HTML tags.

Make sure you try your pages with the browsers provided by major online services such as AOL and Prodigy. You might also want to test with previous versions of the more favourite browsers. Test all your pages after making even trivial changes to your site, just to make sure you haven’t broken something. (Programmers know that you’re far more likely to introduce an error when making changes than when the original work was done.)

During development, you’ve probably done the testing of your site with all the files on the PC. Make sure you test the site after it’s been moved to the server.

Make sure that you test your pages in a way that forces the browser to get everything — both text and images. This means turning off the caching, emptying the store from within the browser, or deleting all the files in the browser’s store directory. This will force the browser to get everything from scratch. You’ll see how long your pages really take to load.

And while you’re doing this, you can measure your browser’s “hang time.” This is how long the browser hangs there with a blank screen before something shows up.

Now go to your browser’s options dialog and make it so that the page always has a white background and the links are their default colors (blue and red). A lot of people will have their browsers set this way to refrain viewing weird backgrounds or strangely-colored links. How does your page look with these settings?

If you can get hold of one, test your site with one of those new widgets that turns your television into an World wide web surfboard. Most of these still have just the abilities of the very primeval browsers. They have lower resolution than most browsers and they reformat the page so it can be read on a television screen.

Turn on the “don’t load images” menu item or checkbox in your browsers option settings. How does your page look without its images? Is it still doable to find your way around?

If your page uses a text font that isn’t one of the defaults, be sure that the page looks right with all the different variations mentioned here.

If your page is blessed with a Java or JavaScript widget, what happens when you look at it with a browser that doesn’t support Java? What about a Java-enabled browser with Java turned off?

If your page needs a special plug-in, or a special helper application, or uses a special file type, test to see what happens if one or more is missing or not supported. It might be enough to make Netscape toss its cookies.

As mentioned previously, there are a number of things that you can place on your page that keep the tiny red “download” indicator from going out after the page has completed loading. If your page has one, see what happens with different browsers. You should think about replacing these widgets with something that doesn’t keep the browser from functioning properly.

Have other people test your web site. Especially if their individualized setup is different from yours.

Have other people proofread your text.

Test on different platforms. In one case, a page that looked fine on a individualized didn’t fare as well on a Macintosh. And this was with the same version of the same browser. One source of problems is specifying a text font that’s only acquirable on a individualized and forgetting to add the Mac equivalent.

If you’ve got a site which has different versions, depending on the browser, you’ve really upped the ante, testing-wise.

Last, but not least, don’t forget to check your server’s error log. It’s the main error reporting and debugging tool for your site. Look for things like missing images, bad links, and errors from CGI scripts. You should check this log on a regular basis, and especially after making changes or additions to your site.

Pay attention when someone tells you they had trouble viewing your site. For apiece mortal who takes the time and trouble to write to you, there are many more who will give up in frustration.

Maintenance

It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it because change is inevitable. In nature also everything changes, seasons, color of the skies, the aroma around us and what nots! The world changes, the web changes, and one day your site will have to be changed just for the intoxicant of changing. That’s what people want. They want design, different colors, animations, sound etc in your web site. In fact some of the hottest sites like Yahoo, Hotmail and Rediffmail have changed quite a lot since their inception if you have noticed.
Is your site simple to modify? Is it simple to make additions and changes? Some of the things that make a site difficult to change are sloppy formatting of HTML code, image maps, and a site where apiece page links to apiece other page.

Can your site be maintained or altered by someone besides you? In the world of commercial web sites, it’s more than likely your site will eventually be inherited by someone else. Have you left them a clear path to follow?

If you use browser-dependent features on your site, you will have to have two or more versions of your pages — a maintenance headache.

Format your HTML documents so that they are simple to read. Use blank lines and spaces to separate elements.

Create a set of uniform formats and styles for your pages so that you can create a new page by duplicating and modifying an existing page.

If you have links to other sites (”My Movies Cool Link List”), you owe it to your visitors to keep these links up-to-date and accurate. You should check them on a regular basis to change or alter links to sites that have moved, and to remove links that now lead to dead ends. Fortunately, there are a number of shareware tools that can aid in this process.

If you move your site to another URL, make sure that you leave a forwarding address at the old URL.

And make sure that your pages are current. If you have a sale, or a contest, or an offer that ends on Might 25th, make sure that the page gets updated or removed within a few days of the expiration. Think about using automated maintenance to build and maintain your HTML pages.

Dead pages:

 

Web sites can grow to be complex, and might undergo continuous modification and evolution.

As pages become obsolete, you update the links on other pages so that noncurrent pages are no longer pointed to. Since nothing on your site points to these old pages, there shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Unfortunately, there might still be links to these noncurrent pages — from other people’s web sites. Three possibilities: search engines that have indexed the page, visitors who have added the page to their list of individualized bookmarks, and visitors who point to your page with a list of favorite links on their site.

This can be a problem if the pages contain information that is no longer current, authentic, or accurate.

One way to see if this is happening is to check your stats to see if orphaned pages are still getting hits. If you have really good stats, they can tell you who has links that point to you.

One thing you can do when a page is dead is to delete it from the server or rename it. Either way, it will return a “not found” error when someone tries to access it. After this is done, you can re-submit the original URL to the search engines. This will force them to look for the page and, not finding it, remove it from their database. Even if you don’t explicitly submit these pages to the search engines, they will eventually look for them and find them missing.

Another thing you can do is to replace these orphaned pages with a generalized page that has a link that points to the main page of your site.

 

It is good if you read the above information and use it to your benefits. Of course this exercise could be helpful but time consuming too! The other option is to contact us at our AIT – India Center and discuss your needs with us and rely on us to deliver a mythologic web site that works on the net. The second option would be more sensible it seems!

Anantait – About the Author:

Head SEO, Marketing at AIT India

Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/web-design-articles/web-design-articles-making-effective-web-sites-designing-577607.html

Advertising agencies have already been an integral part of business for quite some time. They are the firms which help to advertise a business’ goods and services. Since the world wide web has changed the way, we all live and work so it has modified some of the operations that an advertising bureau takes on. In previous times, an bureau would be occupied with creating print advertisements, tv commercials as well as broadcasting ads. Currently those things continue to be necessary however for many the world wide web has become much more important in promoting their enterprise.

Today many people are on the world wide web much more than they follow television. To be healthy to satisfy this need a number of advertising agencies have incorporated advertising and marketing techniques that are one-of-a-kind to the web. They can help in the advertising of websites, weblogs, online catalogs, as well as other such solutions that the business might use to further promote their enterprise on the internet. This frequently is most beneficial when a single bureau handles both print and internet-based marketing and advertising. That leads to work that is consistent and works with apiece other to create a great picture of the organization and what they can offer their potential customers.

Whenever a business is picking an advertising agency to use in promoting their enterprise, it is good that they do some research into the firm and also the principles of the agency. References can supply a lot in enabling a business owner to determine how the bureau has operated in the past and if they had been effective or not. Often an advertising bureau is quite proficient at promoting their company, so doing some research into their references is really a great idea. Nearly all advertising firms employ those who have capabilities in a wide selection of advertising areas. This is beneficial because it expands the various types of marketing options that one might use to advertise your business.

Utilizing an advertising bureau can be a fantastic choice for a business who is trying to get their study and information about their goods and services out to prospective customers. A good advertising and marketing bureau that is experienced knows how to advertise an enterprise in conventional means as well as by using the more current systems of the net. This could be valuable in many different ways to the business which has chosen them. They might be valuable in helping the company get to marketplaces which they might have overlooked previously by making use of advertising models that you might not have considered before. This will go a long way in helping a company’s business to grow which is the eventual intention of most organizations.

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The topics of projected targets and entries for shorter term CFD trading are covered by two experienced traders, Stuart McPhee and David Jenyns.

David: We have been asked the question: ‘Do you use projected targets such as Fibonacci expansion to expect price projection?’

Stuart: No. I don’t like the intent of targets because of that whole intent of forecasting. It’s the intent of, I think the index will be at x in three months’ time. As a technical analyst, I want to refer high probability trading opportunities. There’s no certainty. If it only goes up x percent or if it goes up y percent which is a lot greater, then that’s just the way it happens. I’ve never tried to determine what that might be, I’ve just got mechanisms in place that when the price does certain things I get out when I have to, or I stay in.

David: There are points where you have control over the market.

That’s obviously just when you get in and when you get out. What you do not have control over is what the market is going to do. By picking a point where you are going to get out, I feel as if you are trying to acquire control over something you can have no control over. I like the intent of, you have to cut your losses short and let you profits run. Setting a price projection is not letting your profits run because you’re capping your price potential. For most people letting your profits run is more powerful, and that’s done by setting trailing stops.

The next part of the question is: ‘You speak much about the entry strategy on the medium to longer term trading but you didn’t really expand on the entries used for shorter term CFD trading. Could you please indicate these?’

Stuart: I focus on the medium term because it is a very easy methodology that everyone can understand.

David: When everybody’s new and starting out in trading they are somehow lured into CFD trading and trading the forex.

People trade these exotic instruments because of the high chance of reward, forgetting that there is a high chance of risk as well. Unless you are successful trading stocks unleveraged you probably shouldn’t look at CFDs.

Stuart: Too many people lose money trading these shorter term instruments. It happens all the time and it’s because they have not mastered the fundamentals by trading easy stocks. Stocks are the easiest.

I use a very easy approach for my short term trades and it’s just short term reversal signal, using basic individual bar analysis. It’s short term reversal signal, as long as the parent, the medium term trend is also heading in that direction. It’s a very easy approach for my CFD trading.

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Too many people have theories. You would have read endless ebooks and articles on how niche marketing would work for you, and how you can profit from niche marketing. But what you don’t get is, actual niche marketing examples and case studies. Actual niche examples show you how apiece piece of the puzzle fits in.

Before looking at niche websites, you should know certain things which are important pre-requisites. I’ve stated them below.

Niche Marketing might not be something new to you. But you might have been bombarded with all sorts of false information. You should leave away all assumptions you have about niche marketing. If you have not seen something work for you first hand, don’t adopt it does.

Secondly, the problem with many is that, they jump into the same niche as the example. BIG MISTAKE! These are just examples. Try finding niches of your own.

Don’t confine your creativity to what you see in niche websites already making money.

Thirdly, many don’t follow instructions correctly. They skip over small yet necessary details. If you’re one of them, you’d hardly benefit. Remember, changing even a single word in the world of copywriting can improve revenue drastically. The same applies to niche marketing. Even the unfortunate to comprehend the slightest of details can cause problems later, which you could have prevented.

That’s the reason, you don’t just need to follow the example niche models and websites that rake in money, but also WHY they do it. This would help you adapt the methods to your own niches, instead of creating unpleasant carbon duplicates of websites that work.

Whenever you visit a website, state your favorite hobby’s website, you’re actually visiting a niche website.

Whatever you notice in them are the business model working for them. The ideal way to isolate niche websites is to look at various directories for niches. Also, use Google’s Keyword Tool to find keywords also shows “sub-niches”, which you can then search for yourself to see acquirable websites.

If you’ve thoroughly understood what I’ve said, then you’re ready for your journey. Remember, everything takes efforts. “Smart Work” is not less work, “Smart Work” is putting all your “Hard Work” in the right direction.

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