Building codes
(website design considerations)
Internet visitors are selective with their
travel preferences. They have so many homes (sites) to
select from that they avoid homes that are poorly or
improperly built.
• General guidelines for house design
• Special effects
• Decorations
• Colors & styles
• Amateurish annoyances
• Stereo music in your house
General guidelines for house design
- Don’t use a click-thru entry page. Visitors who
click on a link to your house should be transported
directly into the foyer, not the porch outside your front
door.
- When you change default hyperlink colors in your
house, explain the color scheme to your guests. Visitors expect to find
underlined, blue text as links. If they don’t see them,
they don’t generally know where to click.
- Never use the phrases “Click Here” or “Click Below.”
Visitors are not idiots. They can figure out where to
click by themselves.
- Don’t build a room full of Internet awards. Nobody
cares, there are too many awards, they are too easy to
obtain, and they have nothing to do with the function of
your house.
- Don’t try to design a house that is compatible with
every browser in the world. The major browser in use
today is Microsoft Internet Explorer. The second and
third most
popular browsers are Mozilla Firefox and Netscape
Navigator. When possible, test the appearance of your home with
these three browsers and don’t worry about the others.
- Make sure your hyperlinks are correct and active.
Guests are easily alienated by a “404” error.
- Limit the number of hyperlinks leaving your house.
It is difficult to entice guests into your home in the
first place. Links invite them to leave before they get
your message or buy your product.
- Don’t provide links to Internet search engines in
your house. Your guests know how to find a search
engine.
- Avoid or limit your use of cookies. Most guests
consider cookies an invasion of privacy and a threat to
security. If you must use cookies for visitor
interactivity, it is politically correct to inform them
you are doing so in your house “privacy statement” and
explain the reason.
- Don’t waste your wall space by hanging up
affiliations with guilds, associations or other
organizations to prove your credibility. Organizations like these can provide
useful
learning resources, but displaying their logos in your
home only proves your “amateur homebuilder” status.
- Do not use visible frame dividers. Avoid page frames
altogether if possible. Frames are an indicator of poor
planning and
design.
- Never use “Under construction” text or graphics in
your rooms. If a room isn’t finished, don’t allow
visitors in. How would you feel if you made a reservation
at a motel and found an empty lot with an “under
construction” sign when you got there?
Top
Special effects
-
Don’t place a hit counter on your page. Nobody
except you cares about the number of visitors to your
home. Hit counters increase browser load time and annoy
your guests.
-
Don’t use blinking text – EVER.
-
Think twice before using background music on a page.
It devours bandwidth, annoys many visitors and doesn’t
work in all browsers.
-
Avoid JAVA applets unless you have a compelling and
specific reason for using them. JAVA applets slow down
load times and present security problems.
-
Avoid ActiveX controls unless you have a compelling and
specific reason for using them. ActiveX code presents
potential security problems.
-
House guests have developed an intolerance for
pop-up advertisements or homes that generate multiple
browser pages open at the same time. Pop-ups are a sure
way to guarantee guests erase your address from their
address book.
-
Avoid third party features that come from another
house, i.e., hit counters, guest books, e-mail list
compilers, chat rooms, active content from news or
weather sites, etc. They all slow down browser
loading time and solicit guests to desert you.
Top
Decorations
-
Minimize the use of graphics, especially animated
ones. If a graphic doesn’t enhance a link, title or
text, don’t use it.
-
Don’t link to graphics in other peoples’ homes. It
is rude, slows down page loading and could result in
legal trouble for copyright infringement
.
-
Large graphics slow down browser loading time. Make the
file sizes of your graphics as small as possible.
Top
Colors & styles
-
Don’t use black backgrounds with lightly colored
text unless you really know what you’re doing; and never
in a business home or store. Black backgrounds are normally
regarded as the signature of an amateur home builder.
-
Confine your fonts to those normally included with a
computer’s operating system, i.e., Times New Roman,
Arial, Comic Sans. If you need fancy fonts to enhance
your rooms, create them as graphics.
Top
Amateurish annoyances you should avoid
-
Guest books. Let visitors send you e-mail if they’re
buzzed by your site. Guest books take up server space
and allow visitors to discard pornographic garbage in
your house.
-
Countdown timers to graduation, end of year, next
visit of a comet, etc.
-
DHTML elements floating through the room for no
apparent reason.
-
Link exchange or other advertising co-op banners.
-
“The current date and time is . . . ” Guests have
watches. And they don’t care what the time is in China.
-
Scrolling messages in the browser status box.
Top
Stereo music in your house
Should you play stereo music in your house? Some people
enjoy listening to music while they browse, and some are so
annoyed by it they never return to a house with stereo. There
are several ways to broadcast sound in your house. There are
various types of sound formats and not all visitors have
players for all of the formats. If you insist on experimenting with
sound on your pages:
-
Reconsider your decision to include sound. The quest for a
perfect sound file will consume your life, ruin your
marriage, make your kids hate you, keep you awake nights
and result in the disappointment of your life when you
hear your 128-bit masterpiece played on a co-worker’s
16-bit generic sound card.
-
Whenever possible, use MIDI files (.mid) for your
music. MIDIs have smaller file sizes and download faster
than MPEG, AU, WAV, MP3 or other sound file formats.
-
Don’t use music merely for effect. Always be aware
that a particular song or musical theme could offend
someone if it isn’t appropriate for the content.
-
Avoid any use of copyrighted sound material. There
is a large amount of royalty-free or copyright-expired
music on the Internet. Look for it or compose your own.
Many sound artists allow free use of their sound
creations for personal or non-commercial pages. When you
use someone’s music, give them credit. When you receive
a nasty e-mail from someone claiming to be the owner of
a sound file you found at a supposedly free Internet
site, remove the file and send an “I’m sorry” response.
Return to Designing a house Top
|
Our .coms for sale:
ia classroom
medical crooks
sex graphica
View Complete List with prices. |
