Site Design & Client Side Technology
Last Modified 6/17/99.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the standards for HTML. HTML 4.0 is the most recent version.

In addition to HTML, there is Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Together they make up DHTML (Dynamic HTML). W3C recommends The House of Style for their CSS tutorial. Netscape has a great javascript resource.

DHTML should be used with caution. CSS support only began in version 4.0 of the major browsers. Javascript can crash browsers or cause errors if a user tries to resize the browser window or stops downloading too soon. Some DHTML can only be viewed by users on Windows using Microsoft IE 5.0 or greater. Dan Steinman has a DHTML tutorial that's supposed to be cross-platform. I could view all of them from a Mac using Netscape 4.05 except for one which crashed my browser.

Another reason to keep your site simple is that some search engines have difficulty following links imbedded in image maps, frames, and DHTML. If you want your site thoroughly indexed by all the search engines so it comes up on top of the searches, keep it simple, use a descriptive title, and include keywords and a page description in meta tags in your header. Don't bother repeating keywords. The search engines don't fall for spam these days. They may also skip your page if your keywords don't appear in the rest of your HTML document. If you use too many keywords, your document will appear lower on the list of search engine results. A good Macintosh tool to use to manage your metatags and automatically submit your site to many search engines at once is VSE's Be Found software. It has some stability issues when it comes to the ftp functionality, but the rest of it works great!

Just because you can make the browser perform a certain trick does not mean it enhances your site. Nothing makes me quit a site faster than when I hit a page that starts playing midi music. Scrolling text and animated gifs are sometimes distracting to me. I know this site does not have a lot of dramatic flair, but I'm not advertising Star Wars. A well-designed site has a look and feel that is consistent with it's purpose.

Where did I come up with that beautiful shade of fushia? That would be Color Finder. A free Macintosh program from Acme Technologies. They also give away free CMM's that you can use to easily copy image tags and urls of your documents. I use BBEdit to compose my HTML. I like BBEdit because even the freeware version supports multi-file replacements with regular expressions (grep). That means if I decide to change every font color of my site, I can search for (space)color="#(any text)" and change or rearrange all that code at once. It's a very powerful tool for text processing of all kinds. In addition to the multi-file pattern searches, there are a variety of plug-ins to extend BBEdit's capabilities to include link and HTML checking and tag balancing.

In 1996 I did a web survey to see what color text and background combinations people preferred. Users were allowed to choose their own text and background colors, view their options and then submit the one they preferred best. Out of several hundred users, about 75% chose dark blue text on a white background.

When I was creating the latest version of this site, one of my colleagues advised me to cause all external links to open a new window to keep people on my site. Shortly after that, I read an article by a popular web designer indicating that as one of his top pet peeves. He said if he wanted a link opened in a new window, he'd do it himself. My colleague's argument was that most web surfers don't know how to open a link into a new window.

Besides technical enhancements or annoyances, some sites just have too much content. They're trying to provide so much information that you can't find what you're looking for. A well-designed site's content is focused. The home page should give you an overview of what the site is about. Contact and company information should be easy to find. It's nice to have all the pages listed in an index. That way you down have to memorize a route through a maze of links to find what you're looking for. Timely information should be dated. If the author doesn't have time to keep it up to date, at least you can tell when it was last updated.

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