Most important tip of all: create your Web site so it is easily read by the blind, even if you expect it will be read only by sighted people! This discipline leads to good sites. Besides, in the years to come, you expect some of your sited visitors to listen to you site -- right?
A key to a good Web site is to minimize your graphics, since graphics take so long to download.
Consider my sister's Web site. It contains as few images of her Bed and Breakfast as I thought feasible, yet is almost too slow for comfort. But her guests say they like the site and in particular, they like to see the pictures which show them what to expect.
As a rule, most people like graphics. A Web designer faces a continued tension between how long to keep viewers waiting and how much to show.
Remember to view your own page yourself with a 28.8kb or slower modem. Many Web page designers look at their own pages only from their own computer, on which the page resides, so it loads nearly instantaneously. They are quite surprised when someone complains how slow the pages are to load. Think seriously about viewing your pages at 14.4kb. Many people have slower systems than you might expect. They bought their modems eighteen months ago and have not upgraded or they got one cheap.
Web sites are written using the HTML markup language. It is important to understand that the language does not force a page to look exactly as the designer intended. Instead, the markup language offers suggestions to your viewer's browser as to how the page ought to be displayed. Your browser can follow the suggestions, but is not required to.
For example, a Web page designer may want to center a title. However,
some browsers do not center titles. The designer may want to display his
name in a fancy font but a viewer's browser may display plain text. Or he
tries to display his name as a drawn picture but the browser displays
[IMAGE] rather than the picture.
Create your site so it looks as your desire both with and without centered titles and images, both with and without images.
Build your site so it works with any browser, including text-only browsers, or graphical browsers with graphics turned off. Many designers assume that most people will use a browser with graphics turned on. This is partially true, but not the whole story.
A large number of people turn off graphics for speed or use other browsers. These people tend to have less time and higher standards than others, and to set opinion. These are people to whom you are likely to want to be courteous.
A second reason to design your site so it works well with any browser is that the practice helps you ensure that you have found and removed most or all the technical bugs. If you have mistakes, they will be genuine content mistakes, not stupid technical ones that show you on a bandwagon, but unable to carry a tune.
Often, a webmaster says to himself "It looks fine on my browser so I will leave it as is" -- and don't realize how bad it looks to someone else.
I check out a site using using Arena and Amaya, which are the former and the present test-bed browsers from the W3 consortium (they are the technical standards), as well as Mosaic, Netscape, Lynx, and GNU Emacs W3 mode. Each works a bit differently from the others and helps generate a site that works well.
Every image at my sister's site contains text as an alternative to the image. This means that when a visitor looks at the site with graphics turned off, he or she can see what the images are about (such as, `picture of house in snow') and then look at an image if desired.
Also, each detailed image is accompanied by a faster loading, low resolution, blank and white `embossed' image. Some graphics browsers do not show these images, but others do; these images load first and then are overdrawn by the slower loading and more detailed, colored images. This action gives the viewer something to watch while waiting, so the waiting seems short even though it is actually a few seconds longer than for a page without these embossed images.
All together, this means that each page with an image has four different expected viewing formats:
You can look at the HTML source for any site using your browser's `view source' or equivalent command. Many sites' source is partially or wholly machine written and almost unreadable by humans; these tend also to be poor quality sites. Other sites have HTML source that is easy to follow and is well worth studying.
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