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  • Some Simple Guidelines For Making Websites That Work

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    Cormac Connolly
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    Building websites and constructing web pages properly can be a frustrating and time consuming process. Proper code tags is a very simple, and easily corrected, over sight on many web pages. Importance of metadata metadata provides a quality description of your website as a data source.

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    Some Simple Guidelines for Making Websites That Work

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    Building websites and constructing web pages properly can be a frustrating and time consuming process. Proper code tags is a very simple, and easily corrected, over sight on many web pages. Importance of metadata metadata provides a quality description of your website as a data source.

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    22 views3 pages

    Some Simple Guidelines For Making Websites That Work

    Uploaded by

    Cormac Connolly
    Building websites and constructing web pages properly can be a frustrating and time consuming process. Proper code tags is a very simple, and easily corrected, over sight on many web pages. Importance of metadata metadata provides a quality description of your website as a data source.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 3

    Some simple guidelines for making websites work…

    Some simple guidelines for making websites work….............................................................................1


    Introduction.............................................................................................1
    Proper code tags.......................................................................................1
    Importance of metadata............................................................................1
    Don't depend on JavaScript in page navigation.............................................2
    Make your site easily navigable...................................................................2
    Title every page with name of site...............................................................2
    Link to your home page on every page........................................................2
    Include a index, site map & search form......................................................3
    Visit links before you post them..................................................................3
    Check your coding in more than one browser...............................................3

    Introduction

    Building websites and constructing web pages properly can be a frustrating and time consuming
    process. There are any number of “variables” that ought to be taken into consideration.

    Proper code tags

    A very simple, and easily corrected, over sight on many web pages is incorrectly defined HTML.
    Unfortunately many browsers will display incorrectly defined or unclosed tags “interpretatively”. This
    often serves to exacerbate problems and has the purists, quite understandably, up in arms!

    Simple example:

    <html>
    <head>
    <title>The title of the document</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
    </head>

    <body>
    Some body content in your document
    </body>
    </html>

    Indenting of HTML tags can be a useful visual aid to ensuring they are properly “closed” off.

    Importance of metadata

    Metadata is important. It is complex and initially difficult to read (and can be time-consuming to
    produce). However, metadata provides a quality description of your website as a data source, this helps
    the user/application to understand the data that is presented to them (enabling discovery of data
    catalogues). Metadata can be very important with regard to the “robots” sent out by search engines,
    helping to promote your web address in search results. Particularly relevant are KEYWORDS and
    DESCRIPTION.
    e.g.

    <meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy for Mac OS X (vers 1st March 2004), see
    www.w3.org" />

    <meta name="keywords" content="W3C, World Wide Web, Web, WWW, Consortium,


    computer, access, accessibility, semantic, worldwide, W3, HTML, XML, standard, language,
    technology, link, CSS, RDF, XSL, Berners-Lee, Berners, Lee, style sheet, cascading, schema,
    XHTML, mobile, SVG, PNG, PICS, DOM, SMIL, MathML, markup, open source, software" />
    <meta name="description" content="W3C's nearly 400 member organizations lead the World
    Wide Web to its full potential. Founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the Web's inventor. The W3C Web
    site hosts specifications, guidelines, software and tools. Public participation is welcome. W3C
    supports universal access, the semantic Web, trust, interoperability, evolution, decentralization,
    and cooler multimedia." />

    Don't depend on JavaScript in page navigation

    Modern security issues have lead more web-users to disable scripting on their computers. For websites
    that don’t provide regular HTML hyperlinks on their pages, this means that visitors to the site cannot
    access any pages or content – unless it’s been designed to degrade gracefully (i.e. works without
    scripting). The best attitude is to just say no to any link on your site that isn't an HTML link.

    Make your site easily navigable

    Think of your website as a site rather than a series of pages. Every page you post on a particular
    subject should be related to (and often explicitly linked to) the other pages you post on the same
    subject. Think of building a site from the beginning, and each page you build will be better.

    Title every page with name of site

    Use the TITLE element on each of your pages to give your pages a common name that relates to the
    overall name of your site. That way, readers can remember what site they are on as they visit your
    pages, and know when they have left your site. This also helps them remember the name of your site if
    they download or print out your pages.
    Similarly, every page should have some (or many) design elements in common with all other pages on
    the site, and every page should have a heading (marked with the HTML <h1> </h1> tag pair indicating a
    first-level heading) to give the name of the page some visibility. Some Web page authors don't even use
    the title tag for their pages! (That's considered very bad practice by people who know the Web.)

    Link to your home page on every page

    Make sure that every page on your site has a link to the home page is to build each page from a
    template of standard codes that make sure your pages have useful common design elements. Use a
    template that includes a link to your home page to build every one of your pages. If your site has a logo,
    make sure every page has the site logo (preferably on the top left of each page) and make sure that
    logo is a link back to the home page, except on the home page itself.
    Include a index, site map & search form

    Pages such as index or table of contents or site map pages are well worth making. A good index on
    your site helps prevent E-mail from users saying, "I was looking for information on [subject you have a
    page about] on your site, but I couldn't find it."

    Visit links before you post them

    Dead links are an inherent problem of the World Wide Web. It is important to check all hyperlinks before
    you publish a webpage.

    Check your coding in more than one browser

    Since each web-browser interprets code differently, it is important to test your web pages on a variety of
    browsers. Pages that might look great in Netscape may be incomprehensible to users of other
    browsers - especially if you forget about text-only browsers like Lynx. Consider running your pages
    through the W3C HTML Validation Service to check that your pages meet current standards.

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