Domain Name
Choosing a good domain name is important.
Easy to remember
Choose a name that is easy to remember, and of course the shorter the better.
Register it now, or wait 'til your website is done?
If you have the perfect name already picked out, or if your site design will be centered
around your name, then you probably want to register your domain name now. If you don't
you may lose your perfect name.
Registrars
Registrars are companies that are allowed to sell domain names. So if you plan on
registering your name now, here are a some places to go:
Dotster - My personal choice (the cheapest and you can manage owned domain names online)
Internic
Do it yourself
Creating your own web site is fairly simple. But creating a web site that looks nice and is well
designed can take a lot of time and effort. Below are some guidelines, ideas, and links to help you
along in the process. If you really don't want to learn how, or have the time, to design/create your
own web page then you should skip down to
Web Site Designers for a place
to start looking.
Design, layout, creation
You should try to visualize what you want your site to look like before you begin. At the
very least you need to come up with what you want to offer on your site. The more you can
plan before hand, the less time you will spend changing the entire site over and over again.
Loading times
Keeping the size of your pages to a minimum is usually a good idea. You won't turn away
traffic that doesn't want to wait for a page to load. Use small images, and for larger
images using a compressed format like JPG (JPEG) to keep the images smaller is usually
recommended, unless you require some features like transparent colors which the JPEG format
does not support.
Ease of use
Your site should not be too cluttered, and should be very easy and obvious for any user to
move around your site. It is also a good idea to have links to the main areas of your site
on every page to make it easy to move around your site.
Related sites
Croc o' Lyle - Some good articles on useablity.
Searchable site
Another nice feature is to allow users to search your site, this requires you to use a
script of some sort. This is a very nice feature to have, especially for large sites.
Resources
These are some resources that can be useful in creating your own web site.
Tools
Following are tools that could be useful to you in developing your web site.
Browsers
It can sometimes be useful to have various browsers on your system which you can switch
between, to make sure your pages look how you expect. You can be sure that any given web
page will look different, if only slightly, in all web browsers.
Following are links to the download pages of the more popular browsers being used today:
Opera
Netscape Communicator
Mozilla
Internet Explorer
Web Page Editors
Arachnophilia - Free
Dreamweaver - Commercial web page editor
Netscape Communicator - Their browser is also an editor
Avoid the use of frames
Some sites actually have a need for frames. But as a general guideline you should stay away
from frames. Some of the reasons being:
- Over use of frames will complicate your pages much more than they need to be.
- If somebody enters your pages at some point beyond where your frames are declared (like
from a search engine), then they will be without the frames which may have links to the rest
of your site.
- Browsers do not always display the frame how you want it. If you specify a pixel size
for a frame, viewing it may show it as a different size, this makes page layout difficult.
Support for all browsers
It is good to write you pages to have support for all browsers being used. This may be very
difficult to satisfy at times. You may have to create completely different pages to
support all viewing styles. Avoiding multiply layouts for the same content is
usually a good idea, unless you have programs or scripts to automatically create the rest of
your pages from new content.
Accessibility to the blind and visually impaired
Believe it or not there is software that will read your pages to those who cannot read them
on their own. But this software can get confused if you do strange things in your HTML
documents. Making sure your pages are accessible to the blind is a good idea, please check
out these links related to that topic:
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
META tags
Including a KEYWORDS META tag and a DESCRIPTION META tag is a good idea. It is not
required but many search engines use META tags to place a higher ranking on sites that have
words a person is searching for in them, a small few use ONLY META tags.
Custom Scripts (programming services)
R&R Technologies
tekmanproductions.net
R&R Technologies
Fox Web Designs
Check your links, test your pages.
Dr. Watson - Free, complete check: spelling, HTML, links, etc. (one URL at a time)
Hitbox Doctor - Free, complete check: spelling, HTML, links, etc. (one URL at a time)
W3C Link Checker - Free, check links online. (entire site)
W3C HTML Validation Service - Free, validate your HTML pages online
Xenu's Link Sleuth - Free, Windows software to check links
Keywordcount.com - Count the most frequently used words on a web page. (one URL at a time)
