Mindware Resolve > Tips and tricks Web site Vastushastra Building a Web site is no mean task.

You need to take care of its design, conten t and even decide on factors such as which hosting service you must use. Here ar e some tips that will help you build the Web site of your dreams Picture it When you start designing the site, don't rush into making the pages or graphics yet. Use a paper and pencil, or even an imaging tool (MS Paint is good enough fo r this) and scribble your site layout first. Try and indicate with as much detai l as possible, what fits in which part of the site. You should also check out so me existing Web sites for ideas. It's a good practice to keep all navigation lin ks together. If there are too many of them, club them into logical groups. Keep important items, such as navigational links in the top 400 pixels of the pa ge. Visitors to the site see this area first, so that's where the most important information should appear. Also, ensure that the main body of the page starts w ithin this area, so visitors can start reading the text right away. The first cut When you start designing your site, work on the whole page as a single image ins tead of starting with the different elements. Once this is ready, you can start cropping out each item. This will ensure that all items are of the appropriate s ize and making the final page will be easier. Table smart In browsers, tables do not show up on a page until all content within the table has been downloaded, making a page seem slow. Avoid nested tables and long verti cal tables. Instead, stack tables on top of each other-pages then appear to load faster as each table shows up faster. In this context, it's better to place you r navigation links horizontally, towards the top, as it will show up before most of the rest of the page. Keep the most important links at the top and the rest on the left, or keep top-level sections on the top and subsections on the left. To make a table stand out on a page, use a border around it rather than an image , which is fixed in size. Nest the table within a single-cell table with a cell padding of 1 pixel (or more for a thicker border) and a background of the colour you want for the border. <table border=0 bgcolor=#000000 cellpadding=1 cellspacing=0> <tr><td> <table border=0 bgcolor=#FFFFFF cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0> <tr><td>Content here</td></tr> </table></td></tr></table> Stylise your site Use a style sheet for your site to add consistency and reduce page size. You won 't have to explicitly define many font and paragraph tags. Avoid using inline st yles-this is as good as using HTML tags-except for special cases. Use a single C SS file that has all the style definitions. Once a person visits a page, the bro wser will use the file from the cache for the rest of the pages. Smart coding Do not use any WYSIWYG editors such as MS FrontPage or Netscape Composer. They m ight change the script you are copying and it's possible that errors might occur on your Web page. Use a normal text editor such as Notepad to do HTML inclusion s/exclusions. If you know a bit of HTML you can use frames to load message boards and guest bo oks within your main site. Check out www.wdvl.com for more information. Treasure house of scripts

You will want your site to be highly interactive so that users find it easier to navigate. You might want to add menu systems, mouse scroll effects, etc. What y ou would definitely want is dynamic content. You can download any number of thes e scripts for free from Dynamicdrive.com. RSVP You have worked hard to put together your online monument. Wouldn't you like to hear from the visitors whether they liked your site? A guest book is your soluti on. Some free subdomain name registrars such as Freeservers and Yahoo Geocities provide a free guest book within the site manager. Visit www.guestbookgiant.com and signup for a free service. Create as many guest books as you want and customise them from the respective menus. After customisi ng the guest book, click on the 'Get code' link. This provides you two links-one to enter the guest book and the other to view it. Paste these links on to your Web site. There! Now visitors to your site can use the guest book to send their feedback to you. Sew that button There are sites that help you render buttons. Visit www.flamingtext.com and clic k on the buttons section listed at the top of the page. Choose the style and app earance of the button. The final section of the page lets you add text and chang e features such as colour gradients, the shape, etc of the button. Make your mod ifications and click on the 'Add text' button to create your button. A few secon ds and your button's rendered and displayed on the Web site. Save it by right-cl icking on it. Meta tags to mobilise your site Meta tags are HTML tags that carry descriptions about your site. Keywords that s earch engines look for (while indexing) are usually placed inside the Meta tag o f a Web page. To analyse whether your Meta tags are useful, visit http://www.bcentral.com/prod ucts/metatags.asp and enter your URL in the space provided. Click on the 'Check Metas' button. The Meta tags in your site are analysed and results are displayed . Use the site's 'Meta tag builder' tool to build better tags that will rank you h igher in search engines. Keyword meta tag: <META NAME ="keywords" CONTENT="technology, computers, digital lifestyle"> Description meta tag: <META NAME="description" CONTENT="This page is about techn ology, computers and digital lifestyle."> Get listed Focus on the site: Search engines rank their results according to relevance with the search phrase. If you get yourself listed on the 'Education' section while your page talks about entertainment, most visitors will turn away from your site . So focus on the content and get listed in the appropriate section. Do not spam your index: If you think repeating the keyword in the Meta tags or t he title of Web page will rank you higher in the search, you are wrong. Most sea rch engines are trained to ignore such spamming of keywords and they might even remove you from the result set. Submit to specialised searches: Use the services of www.submitexpress.com or www .submit-it.com to submit your site to some of the popular search engines. Not al l search engines work in the same manner. Look for special instructions on the s earch engine's Web site and customise accordingly.