Web Site Tips for Beginners
Bypass common blunders.
Opinion page by Duane Alan Hahn.

Below are various tips that might be helpful to you if you want to create a new web site. I'm not an expert, but if you have any questions that I might be able to answer, just contact me and I'll see if I can help. Your questions might give me ideas for new sections I can add to this page, so don't be afraid to ask. If you don't have questions, but have suggestions about how I can improve this page, please send in your ideas. I can't think of everything, so the more ideas I receive, the better this page will get.

Copy and Paste

If you don't know how to copy and paste, take a few minutes to learn because that ability is one of the most basic requirements when using computers. I was shocked when I found out that there are people who have been using computers for months or years who still don't know how to copy and paste text. They retype everything, from plain text to HTML.

Besides the two main ways to do it, you can also highlight some text, hold down the Control key and press the c key. Left click on the spot where you want to place the text then hold down the Control key and press the v key. It's easy to remember because the c and v keys are right next to each other. The keyboard shortcuts are nice to know because some software won't let you use the common ways to copy and paste.

In case you need help, the video from YouTube below shows how to copy and paste:

No Retyping Necessary

If you use a WYSIWYG editor and want to change the font, style, or size of a chunk of text, you don't have to retype the whole thing. It's a lot like a word processor. All you have to do is highlight the text and make your adjustments. The selected text will instantly change with no retyping. You might think this is a stupid tip, but some people really do think that they have to retype everything.

Clear Your Cache

This is one of the main reasons why so many newbies have such slow-loading web sites. They pack their pages full of slow-loading images and animations and then don't understand why their pages don't immediately load for visitors who actually bother to complain. The reason why those pages load so fast for the creators of those web sites is because all of the images are sitting in their browser's cache instead of coming off the Internet.

If they would clear their cache, they would see how slow their pages really load, at least for visitors who use a similar Internet connection.

Your Main Page

It's amazing how many people still don't name their main page index. It lets you have a shorter address. For example, using www.mysite.com is much better than using www.mysite.com/homepage.html or any other thing you might name your main page.

To be clear, I'm talking about the file name of the page, index.html, not the display title of the page.

Smarter Page Titles

If your site is called Nose Pickers Anonymous, that's what the display title of your main page should be. Don't use something like home or Welcome to Nose Pickers Anonymous because it makes it harder for people to find it again if they bookmark your web site. Giving your main page a proper title is also better for search engines.

Entrance Pages

Many entrance pages are a waste of time. They're like the speed bumps of the Internet. An entrance page can be useful in a few cases, especially when giving visitors a chance to select a language or frames/non-frames or Flash/non-Flash, but those are the rare times.

If you must have an entrance page, please give visitors more than one option. There should be some kind of navigation. A useless entrance page that just sits there with only one option that says, 'click here to enter' is terrible.

And if you have one of those slow-loading Flash "ego intro" splash pages, be sure to provide a skip intro button that actually works before the whole intro loads. You and your friends might think your intro is cool, but most people don't want to wait for your overblown ego stroker to load.

Same Site, Same Window (or Tab)

All normal pages within your web site should open in the same browser window (or tab). I've been to some web sites that open a new window for every onsite link. That makes a web site a pain to use.

No Spaces in File Names

Avoid using spaces in file names. That's file names for your pages, images, music and so on. For example, if you name a page using spaces, it won't look like this to your visitors:

my pet mongoose.html

It will look like this:

my%20pet%20mongoose.html

Most people who know about this problem either have no spaces or they use a hyphen or an underscore (low line). Here are a few good examples:

mypetmongoose.html

my-pet-mongoose.html

my_pet_mongoose.html

Use Lowercase File Names

You never know if you'll have to move your web site to a new host and many hosts do not allow uppercase letters in file names. If you always use lowercase, you can feel confident that your pages and files will work with any host.

Use Relative URLs

If you want to be able to browse a copy of your web site on your computer or if you think your web address might change in the future, use relative URLs. A relative URL does not include all of that 'http://www.mysite.com' stuff at the beginning of the address. It's just the name of the file and the folder or folders it might be in. The 'http://www.mysite.com' stuff turns a relative URL into an absolute URL. Absolute URLs are needed when linking to other web sites, but you'll usually want to stick to relative URLs when it comes to pages of your own web site linking to other pages of your site.

Related Link

Web Developers Notes: Relative and Absolute URLs

Creating New Pages

This is a tip for people who are not using generic templates. If you are making your own unique web site, once you have created a page that you feel is as perfect as it can be and you're ready to create another, make a copy of your 'perfect' page. You can then make changes to the copy, but your logo, navigation, and other things you want on every page will always be in the same place. Similar to people who retype text instead of using copy and paste, some people create every new page from scratch which wastes too much time and almost ensures that their pages will look irregular and unpleasant.

When making new pages from a 'perfect' one, be sure to change the page title, description, and keywords along with other things you are changing. It can be easy to forget to change those things if you're not paying attention.

Be Consistent

I have been to so many web sites where the title or logo bar is a different size or in a slightly different position on just about every page. I've seen even more web sites where the global navigation is in a different order on some pages and is often a little lower or higher or too far to the left or right. Those aren't the only things that people do to make their pages look inconsistent, amateurish, and untrustworthy, but I hope you get the idea.

Global Navigation

It's best to have the same navigation on every page, in the same place, and in the same order. It makes it easier for visitors and gives them a kind of comfort zone. All links should be recognizable at a glance. Most visitors don't like a navigation Easter egg hunt.

I've been to some web sites where you don't know where you are, then you end up clicking on the navigation for the page you're already on. Those are two problems that can be easily fixed. Clearly label each page and turn off the navigation link for the active page. Any navigation link that points to the current page should be made 'unclickable.' It gives your visitors one less thing to deal with.

Remember, deactivate the link, but leave it there. Some people delete the link instead. That's not a good idea. Letting the deactivated link sit there helps make it even clearer to your visitors what page they are on. Changing the color of the deactivated link so it stands out from the rest is also a good idea.

Resizing Images

I've visited more than a few web sites over the years that displayed small images that were actually huge in physical size and file size. For example, some people might take a large 850 x 700 image and resize it to 200 x 165 using the HTML width and height attributes. That's not good. No matter how much you optimize a large image, it will still be too large in file size for a frequently used page. It will take too long to load and waste bandwidth for no good reason. Why display an image that is 100K or more in file size when it could be less than 20k?

If you want to display a smaller image, resize it first with your favorite image editor, optimize the image, then put it on your web page using the actual width and height attributes of the resized image. It's not hard to do and you will be making things better for you and your visitors. If you don't have any software that can resize images, try the freeware program IrfanView.

Pop-Ups

You probably know that most people hate pop-up ads of all kinds, but you may not know that another thing they hate are unnecessary pop-up messages where they have to hit an OK button to continue. One thing that creates those stupid pop-up messages are no-right-click scripts. If you really think that you need one, check out the kind I talk about on my Hotlinking is Theft page.

Text

Instead of repeating everything here, just check out my Text Tips page. You'll find useful information that takes many newbies years to learn about on their own.

Scrolling Text

Sooner or later, some beginners discover a script that allows them to put scrolling text in the status bar. I've even been to some web sites that had scrolling text in the title bar. The title bar and the status bar should be free from any kind of animation.

Scrolling text on a page gets old really fast anyway, but to put scrolling text in the status bar or the title bar where people cannot get away from it is similar to an attack. You just gave their browser a 'mini-virus' that they cannot get rid of until they leave your web site. Don't use scrolling text anywhere if you want to keep from annoying the crap out of most of visitors.

Another idiotic thing I have seen is where the whole page automatically scrolls down on its own. That is just plain wrong. Forcing people to read at the speed you decide is annoying and inconsiderate.

A lot of people hate scrolling text. It's either too fast or too slow, so if it's worth reading, it's worth putting it in plain text so people can read it at whatever pace they like.

Animation

Have you ever visited a web site that seemed to have every kind of bouncing, dancing, scrolling, flipping, flopping, flapping thing that could possibly be squeezed onto the main page? Those types of sites are usually made by beginners who don't know that one of the most important things is to have their main pages load as fast as possible.

It's not too hard to understand that a ton of animated stuff on a main page can take too long to load, but that's not the only problem. An abundance of scripts, applets, and animated GIFs can make a home page look trashy. Reminds me of those creepy people who overcrowd their front yards with random lawn ornaments. Many people will have less respect for a web site and the owner when the main page looks like the creator is clueless and has absolutely no common sense or discernment. That's especially bad if you have a business web site.

The more unnecessary 'cool stuff' that's put on a page, the slower it will load. This includes rising or falling objects such as leaves or snow, lake applets, graphics or text that follows the mouse pointer around the screen (mouse trails) or special downloads that change the shape of the mouse pointer. All of that extra junk can make a web site almost unreadable and hard to navigate too. It's not hard to understand that web sites should be easy to read and easy to use.

Music

Another thing that many newbies love is music that plays automatically. Bad idea. It takes too long to load (even using a fast connection) and an unexpected loud noise is not usually welcomed by anyone. Most people won't like your choice of music, and there is a good chance that many people will never come back to your site after experiencing your sneak attack. If you must have music on your web site or you'll just die, give your visitors a choice. Let them turn the music on if they feel like listening to it.

Hit Counters
(H.I.T.S. = How Idiots Track Success)

Most hit counters only count how many times a page has been accessed, not how many unique visitors it has had. If one person visits the same page 10 times, that's not 10 different people. Hit counters are basically useless and they make a site look amateurish. You don't want to give people the wrong impression, especially if you have a business site.

You might say, "but I've seen hit counters on business web sites, so hit counters must be great." Yes, it's amazing how many little rinky-dink business sites have hit counters, but you will hardly ever see a hit counter on any of the big sites. It's best to ignore any business site with a hit counter because anyone who has been on the Internet for more than a nanosecond should know better.

Stats and log file analysis are better than hit counters and they can help you adjust your content based on the actions of your visitors and what search engine keywords they used. Besides the fact that hit counters are amateurish looking, no one with even a drop of common sense would want to hand over traffic information to their competitors. It's silly, and if a business site does that, what other poor choices are they making?

Protect Your Web Site

Many newbies think nothing will ever go wrong. Even if you don't delete a page by mistake or make a change you wish you could reverse, there's a chance that you could get a computer virus or your hard drive could die.

To protect your web site, make a backup copy of your web site folder before making any major changes. Copying the folder to another place on your hard drive is better than nothing, but it's best to save copies to something other than your hard drive if you can. When you backup your site regularly, you'll get the bonus of having a record over the months and years of how your web site has changed.

Copyright Date

Make sure your copyright date is updated at the start of each year. A web site with an old date gives the impression that the owner is sloppy, unprofessional, or has abandoned the web site.

Browser Compatibility

All browsers are not the same, so cross-browser compatibility is important. Since you can't test your pages with every browser out there, checking with a few of the most popular browsers should give you an idea of what your pages will look like to most visitors. Below is a list of some of the most popular browsers:

Internet Explorer

Firefox

Opera

Safari

Google Chrome

Don't get lazy and tell your visitors that your site is best viewed with a certain browser.

HTML Verification

Some HTML errors cause noticeable problems, but you can have many hidden errors. Those errors may not mess up the display, but they might cause problems with search engines. If you use a program such as Namo WebEditor, you can check your pages for errors any time you want with the built-in HTML verifier. If you don't have your own HTML checker, you can use the free limited one at NetMechanic or the extremely picky W3C Markup Validation Service.

Spelling and Grammar

Poor spelling and grammar can scare people away no matter what kind of site you have, but that means lost sales for business web sites. I have a major problem with this one because I'm bad with both spelling and grammar. I can't do much about grammar, but I do have Namo WebEditor's built-in spell checker which saves a lot of time compared to other ways of spell checking. If you don't have something like that, you can check your spelling using various programs or free online tools such as SpellCheck.net.

I've visited many small business web sites that have a lot of obvious spelling mistakes and there's no excuse for that with all of the tools that are available, so be sure to use some kind of spell checker since most everyone makes mistakes. You can also check out my Common Grammar Related Errors page if you feel you're a little weak in that area.

Contact

It might seem obvious that people should be able to contact you, but there are a lot of web sites out there that have no way to contact the owners. Whether it's normal e-mail, an e-mail form, or a guestbook, your visitors need a way to contact you. Sometimes things can stop working, so remember to check your web site at least once a month to make sure people can reach you.

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