Design Your Own Web Site

Internet search engines are becoming overwhelmed with the large amount of material on the Internet, careful consideration needs to be made of your page title and meta tags at the beginning of your document. Things to avoid are common spamming methods, heavy word repetition and using hidden text. Users find sites through search engines (78%) Other web pages (62%) referrals (53%) and printed media (44%).

Navigation ease is a second important consideration. Your "navigation instructions" need to be clear and consistent throughout the site. It is necessary to understand why your visitors are coming to your site. Are they coming for quality information, comparison shopping, a value added experience or entertainment? Each audience has its own specific need and each will have their own search style. One needs to understand the goals of the people visiting your site, then accommodate their objectives through the navigation method.

Download time is important. The majority of visitors will only wait 15-25 seconds for results or go on to another site. Web pictures should be small and compact taking little time to download, animation need to be quick, Java applets and Java script should be simple and work on all Java capable browsers. Avoid Layers, Direct X, and visual basic as they are proprietary languages working on a specific browser.

Once your site is constructed view it in Netscape and Internet Explorer, try both current and older versions. What works in Netscape may not work in Internet Explorer or vice versa. Try your site on different machines and from different locations. There are a limited number of web safe colours you can use that will have the same appearance in either browser. 47% of net citizens use Internet Explorer (4.x), 41%(4.x or 3.x) use Netscape, 9% use older versions of explorer (3.x or 2.x) the remainder a variety of lesser known browsers.

Overall web site design and compatibility has been handicapped by the lack of agreement on HTML standards between the two major browser manufacturers. As a consequence of this indecision professional web designers have been slow in implementing newer browser technologies such as Dynamic HTML, video, and 3d imagery. Third party "Plug Ins" have been used but require the site visitor to download the appropriate "Plug In" before the technology can be viewed on the web site.

Content, as I have written a number of times, is still king the overall web site design has to compliment and/or supplement the message. Improper use of "bells and whistles", new "flash" technologies or colour will distract from the message, not add to it.