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Saturday, July 3, 2010

Web Design Secrets

Hey, recently i visited a article that provided a useful information regarding the web designing. I read the complete article and found very interesting and useful points for beginner. It mentioned how the website design should be and how it should not be. The article mentioned the use of sitecounters, sitemap and javascripts .

Here i am providing some points which i liked it .

1. Think twice before using framesets: In the olden days you could argue a use for framesets because of HTML’s lousy layout capabilities. Today with CSS positioning being well supported by all the major browsers there is no need to use framesets for just about 99.9% of websites. Why don’t you want to use framesets you ask? Well beginners tend to have trouble creating and using them properly. Framesets tend to make websites more complicated than they need to be and finally they can cause you all kinds of problems with the search engines.

2.Chat rooms: Most people don’t give a crap about chat rooms. And worse than having a chat room is an empty chat room! Who wants to hang out at a club that has nobody inside? So unless you have a web site with tens of thousands of visitors a month and is of a subject that might necessitate a chat room, don't do it.

3.Flash intros: I am guilty of this as much as the next guy. A few years back Flash intros where all the rage, not sure if anyone knew why we ‘needed’ them, but as it turns out the ‘skip intro’ button is the 2nd most clicked on the web today. Don’t waste your time on Flash intros and in my opinion Flash should be only used in special situations.

4. Under construction pages: Just forget it, if the page is not ready, don’t put it up. If you have links that are pointing to the pages, disable them until your page is ready. If your page is truly ‘under construction’ and has content on it that is ready to be seen by your web surfers, just post a ‘last updated’ date and make sure you get the new content in place soon. What ever you do, don’t put one of those cheesy ‘under construction’ images on the page.

5. Do make you web pages viewable at 800 x 600 resolution.

Many web designers have computers that can display higher resolutions like 1024x768 and 1280 x 1024. They design there pages to fit in that resolution, when someone hits those pages with a computer that can display only a maximum of 800 x 600, the visitor has to scroll to see the page properly.

Scrolling web pages vertically (top to bottom) is ok, as long as it's not more than two and half pages or so. But scrolling horizontally (side to side) is really bad and annoying to visitors.

In a nutshell, you want to design all your pages these days for 800 x 600; they make up about 40% of the web audience!


6.Do create a custom 404 ‘Page not found' page.

We've all seen them, 404 pages. On websites that are served by Windows servers it is a plain white page that has this text:

The page cannot be found

The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

Please try the following:

  • If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
  • Open the www.fakesite.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
  • Click the Back button to try another link.

HTTP 404 - File not found
Internet Information Services

Technical Information (for support personnel)

  • More information: Microsoft Support

Not very friendly and not useful to visitors, since the page itself doesn't give you much information. The solution is that you can create your own 404 page and have that appear instead of the practically useless one that you see above.

A 404 page is just an html page like any other, you just need to ask your host to set it up so you can use your own home made 404 page. A good 404 page will be clear to the visitor that they found the right website, but just not the right page. 404 pages should include a link back to your ‘home' page and maybe the site map page. If you have a search engine built into your site, then include the search too.


You can read the article through the following Link

Src: http://www.secretsites.com/do_dont_part1.jsp