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100 Things100 Things you Can do Right Now To Make Your Web Site Betterby Philip Greenspun for the Web Tools ReviewNote that a lot of these ideas have found their way into Database Backed Web Sites and arepresented in a more organized fashion there.Add Width and Height TagsAdd width and height tags to your in-line images. This will make allof the text on your pages immediately available to users, if there arehundreds of in-line images. That's because you are telling thebrowser how big the images are going to be. See my images section for pointersto free software that automatically adds these.Replace all your PostScript docs with PDFMac and PC lusers generally can't view PostScript files on-screen.Also, some badly administered Unix sites have a broken link betweenNetscape and Ghostscript. Standard text indexing software doesn'tusually understand PostScript format. Finally, PostScript files withfonts are huge and those without fonts are mostly useless.Kill a pile of birds with one stone by getting Adobe Distiller, aproduct that automatically converts PostScript to PDF files that maybe viewed with the Adobe Acrobat reader. Despite being a totalWindows Caveman, I installed the Windows version on an NT box with onemouse click and about two minutes of waiting time. It took me 30seconds to convert two PostScript files and the resultant PDF docs wereone third the size of the originals. Great software, available forMac, Windows, and various brands of Unix poison. Distiller comespackaged as part of Acrobat Pro.Delete the Hit Counter You could put a big headline on your site saying "this page getsalmost no traffic." Alternatively, you can just add one of thoselittle GIFs that counts the hits. Face facts: if you have 200,000hits/day then neither you nor any of the public services is going towant to spend the server resources to generate all of those littleGIFs. If you don't have 200,000 hits/day, then why advertise thefact?If you can't live without the hit counter, then at least put WIDTH andHEIGHT fields on the IMG tag so that users don't have to wait (seeabove) for the text below the counter.Upgrade and Tune your UnixA lot of university servers are running on discarded Unix boxes. Notonly is this hardware slower than the average 10-year-old's PackardBell Pentium Pro, but usually it is running SunOS or HP-UX 9.x or someother ancient version of Unix. A popular Web server is going to buildup and tear down millions of TCP connections in between boots. Do youreally believe that the code was designed for this back in 1991? Thatit doesn't have memory leaks? That it won't get tired/fragmented/whatever?The latest Unices often contain comprehensive rewrites of the networkcode.Stop using Frames and Weird ColorsHTML gives the user wicked ugly documents but at least the userinterface is stable. Static text, hyperlinks, and visited links arein the same colors across servers. At least it used to be that wayuntil Netscape whored up the standard with frames and arbitrarycolors. Personally, I'm a fan of bashing the background to white, butotherwise I think it is important to have a stable user interface.Add Client-Side Image MapsImagemaps sucked for a lot of reasons. They were 100X the size of atext menubar and usually conveyed less information since the usercouldn't see in advance where clicking a region would take him.Client-sideimage maps have solved the user interface problem and they arebackward compatible with older browsers. If you have any imagemaps onyour site, you should add a client-side map to the HTML file.Index Your SiteThere are magical moments when the Web is actually better than paper.One of those is when you search for something and get relevant documentsback. Grab the free PL Web software from www.pls.com.If you don't feel like maintaining your own full text index, you canactually sleaze off Altavista, Lycos, or whatever. You just write aCGI script that processes your own form and redirects to AltaVista,adding an advanced query syntax in front that restricts the search toyour host. My friend Leigh figured this out and uses it on his site.Run a Spider Against Your SiteDead links are the bane of Web users everywhere. I try never to moveanything once it is on my server, but not everyone is so fastidious.The Web Consortium sets a really bad example with their own server. I usually find thatabout 20% of the links are dead and these are mostly internal!You can smoke out your dead internal and external links by running aspider against your site. This is what www.webcrawler.com is doing tothe whole Web. You want to do the same thing, but only go 1 leveldeep outside of your server. If you're running the mighty AOLserver,then you just need this program that Jin and Iwrote. If you are benighted, then you'll need to inspect this whole pile of spider programs (I'm not sure which is theeasiest to use).The Rest of the 100 Things...... I haven't figured out yet.Return to Web Tools Review homeHit counter graphic courtesy Designi/O. Otherwise, text and pictures are copyright 1996 PhilipGreenspun.philg@mit.eduReader's Comments Try Not to Force Your Format on User InputSome people are more comfortable entering the
spaces or hyphens they see in their credit card
number (it's easier to read and verify that way),
don't like parentheses around their area code,
want to enter their Zip+4 not just their Zip code
to help the post office out, and many other
things that Web site form force on them. Your
internal format and the way you display it is up
to you (although maintaining the users' original
format for at least their verification is
better), and once the spaces are removed by you
the credit card number has to be numeric, but try
to only force how data is entered when it is
absolutely necessary.
Never Throw Away User InputAfter they've entered it the way they like,
there's nothing worse than throwing it away
because they entered something incorrectly.For example, you fill out a lengthy credit and
address form, send it, are told something wasn't
numeric that has to be, and to hit "Back" to
correct it. You hit it, discover the whole form
has been blanked out, and decide maybe you don't
want to buy that after all. -- Fred Ballard, March 2, 1998 Just a quick note about PDF files: users of Unix
variants not supported by Acrobat Reader can still
view PDF files by using xpdf from ftp.x.org, or
by converting to postscript using later versions
of Ghostscript. -- Jim Wise, March 31, 1998 Actually ghostscript (5.0 and up) can convert
postscript to pdf beautifully. If you are going
via latex->ps->pdf, make sure that you use
postscript fonts though. The resultant pdf will
be much smaller.
-- Ramarao Kanneganti, April 8, 1998 Instead of setting your page's background color to white(#FFFFFF), set it to off-white( or whitesmoke, #EFEFEF). Pure white tends to bleed into other colors on TV output (e.g. WebTV). -- Brian Baquiran, August 21, 1998 I am not sure that defining only text and
background colour is the way to go. If I have set
my graphical browser to display all links in
white and you have set the background white, I
will miss all the links on a page. Either set all
colours or none. If you want to keep a consistent
interface, by using the colours that a large
portion of the web uses by (browser) default, then
hard code all the colours. -- Branko Collin, September 7, 1998 Don't Assume that Everyone is an American
This is important if you're selling something.
Not every country uses the same number of digits in their phone numbers.
Not all zip codes (called postal code in some countries) have the American format.
Not every country is divided into states(!).
Don't Use Long Option Menus
Some sites let you select the country you live in from an option menu with several hundred entries. This requires lots of manual dexterity, and on most Unixes (I don't remember how it is under Windows and Mac) the cascaded menus will appear on top of each other when reaching the right border of the screen.
Why is that a problem? Because the "more" item at the bottom usually will appear at the same place as the "more" item in the next cascade, thus popping up all the cascades which exists!
Instead you could use a list box, where one can scroll down to the appropriate section. Or let people write in plain text the country, and then checking that against probable matches, and then presenting the probable matches on the next page.
-- Paul Kenneth Egell-Johnsen, July 7, 1999 Add 'ALT' tags to ALL your images. If there is no alternative text that makes sense, use alt="" - this will help text-only browsers more than you will believe.Don't use 'ALT' text like 'GIF image, 14Kb'. It's no help to anyone. -- Bruce Coker, September 12, 1999 Don't require your users to download a plugin unless they are strongly committed to using your site (otherwise they will realize what a hassle it is and leave) and unless you really can't provide that functionality without the plugin. Most plugins are a drag to download over a slow connection, may ask the user to reboot their machine, may crash the browser, may crash the OS and are only easily available for Windows and MacOS. -- Lucas Gonze, September 19, 1999 Eliminate all Java applets unless you really, really, really have a need for it/them. Nothing infuriates me more (well, a few things do) than to spend ten minutes trying to start a page's Java applet, possible crashing my browser and CPU (especially since the big two browser's Java implementation on Mac's is less than ideal right now) only to find it's for a chintzy little scrolling message image that says something timely like "Dewey Defeats Truman."
-- phil gavenda, November 20, 1999 Don't use Java for navigation menus
Nothing ticks me off more then to have to wait for the stupid java application to download just to go where I want. That is unless the java applet crashes, or just plain doesn't run because they didn't bother to test it. You you absolutely have menus with that "hover" effect, use JavaScript (so I can disable it on my side). -- Derek Dysart, December 7, 1999 I had mentioned an excellent external free site-search program for people who don't run their own servers. The limit is 5,000 pages (vs others' 500 pages). This one has NO ads and it even offers boolean searches and other advanced options. I have no idea why they do this. Also, it doesn't use javascript and is faster.
It's Texis, at Thunderstone, and their webpage for that is here.
Since the time I found and wrote about them, I've come across www.atomz.com which indexes only up to 500 pages but which has an advanced option that's easier for users and which also indexes results of cgi runs.
It doesn't do boolean searches but sort of emulates them in a limited way which is easy-to-use. Results are much more detailed, showing you context for each page.
Also it lets you re-index your site at anytime while Thunderstone Texis' is allowed only 8 hours apart.
I've decided to keep the atomz.com one on my umbrella site, at the top of my page for those curious what it is like. - Andrys
-- Andrys Basten, May 8, 2000 90% of users work on a 14" monitor. Always try to work to the resolution of a smaller monitor. -- AARON DAVIS, September 6, 2000 In addition to the many useful tips here, I'd like to suggest that most pages should have a "first presented" or "last updated" date. Some pages should have both. This can be in some "cheap" real-estate - maybe near the footer.While reading your site, I was surprised to find references to the new Netscape 1.1 browser, for example. I just graduated from using the 6.0 version to Mozilla. Particularly, with advice and howto pages, I really value a quick hint at how current the data is likely to be. I don't necessarily depart old pages, I just make sense of them more quickly. -- Robert Mackie, October 8, 2001 Be military-friendlyMilitary members often have addresses that are part of the military post office system. They usually look like this:NameStreet addressAPO, AE 12345where "APO" is the "city" (really stands for "Army Post Office"), and "AE" is the "state" (can be anything, this, I think (not sure), is Europe). -- Jeremiah Moss, December 11, 2002 As you are emphasing on broken links, I would like to tell about Dead Links, a link cheker spider I've developed. Hope you like it. -- Mario Carbonell, January 18, 2004 One of the most prevalent mistakes that I see in website design lies in the area of navigation and user-friendliness. Some tips on navigation:
- Make sure that wherever your visitor is in your site, they can get to any other area
- Make sure they know where they are!! If you have a deep site with lots of internal pages, I suggest placing a "You are Here" ICON with a path back to the top. This is sometimes known as "Breadcrumb navigation"
- Readability. I sometimes see heroic graphical feats in navigation buttons, but ... bummer I can't read them .. or they are so loud and distracting that I can't concentrate on page content.
- Be honest about your content. Don't mislead a visitor into going to a page on your site and disappoint them with content unrelated to the link text. -- Outdoor Decor, March 20, 2004 Another useful feature is an XML Sitemap. It helps search engines see when some page deep on your site has changed. (See Google Webmaster Tools for info on how Google uses the sitemap.)
My sitemap-o-matic script will build a sitemap and also notify you of broken links and other site errors, and which pages on your site link to the pages with errors. (Run it from cron and you get the report in your mail.) -- Don Marti, September 8, 2008 Add a comment Related Links Best Web Tools- High performance, easy to use web tools for everyone! (contributed by Mark Slicks)Jacob Nielsen's UseIt.com site- Read some very useful tips on making usable web pages, and five years' archive of Nielsen's "UseIt" column. (contributed by Naveen Agnihotri)Web Design Frequently Asked Questions- Over the course of several years in the late 1990's and early 2000's, many web designers asked questions on the famous (or perhaps notorious) Webmonster Web Design list.
The most frequently-asked questions are noted, and in many cases ANSWERS ARE GIVEN! (contributed by George Girton)Free Online Marketing Tools & Forums- Lots of information on promoting your site - free ranking reports, submissions, keyword analysis & more (contributed by Michelle Joyce)Building a good listing with Google in 1 year- Singer Design :: Forget about using all those software based tools which submits your sites to thousands of search engines... (contributed by Singer Design)Web Design Pros Creative Services- Web design site featuring resources, information and a full creative services department. (contributed by kevin canelloni)Dead link checker- A free, fast, online, spider based broken link checker that also gives search engine tips. (contributed by Mario Carbonell)Web Design & Development Information- Basic web development processes and information. (contributed by jason arego)XSLT Resources- Begining web design guide to XSLT. (contributed by Bob Sands)Web design California, web designer- Web site design company, Go for custom web site design at Affordable price. Custom website design. Small business website design - atozsolution. (contributed by jessica jenny) Add a link _uacct = "UA-315149-1";urchinTracker(); |
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