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Web Watch
Creating a site? Follow these expert tips

By Theo Gantos

Last week, we discussed strategies for planning an effective online presence. This week we'll focus on implementation tips for making the best site you can. The best web providers will know just about everything on this list, but might not fight with you over them if you insist on committing a net faux-pas.

Lose the gimmicks. Scrolling marquees, blinking type and hit counters don't have anything to do with your business. A while back, the car dealers overused digital picture in a picture effects to the point that all car dealer commercials looked alike. A hit or visit counter tells everyone how little you know about demographics and target marketing. It also changes your page every time it's accessed and thus defeats caching software designed to reduce the strain on your modem. The other goofy Java applets and such are buggy. They don't work for every browser, and, in general, are distractions. Keep it simple.

Use e-mail links and addresses correctly. A bad example of an e-mail link is texaco@texaco.com. This doesn't convey either the function you are intending or the person. What it conveys to experienced internauts is that you aren't experienced (and they might properly surmise that e-mail will probably go unanswered). The convention is to use info@texaco.com for general info requests (which usually auto-reply with a standard info document) or something like sales@company.com, service@company.com, suggestions@company.com, or webmaster@company.com. Your web consultant should be able to work with your Internet provider to get this accomplished.

Keep file sizes to a minimum. Not everyone has a T1 line. In fact, most people use 28.8 modems. So don't put huge graphics on every page in an effort to "jazz up the site." People will run away if the home page is still loading after 30 seconds. If they want the big stuff, they will click on a link and wait to download it. But give your visitors the choice.

Keep the page size to a minimum. No one will want to read endless lines of text laid out on one page. Remember what we said last week about recycling print and other material on the web -- just say no! Break things up in logical bite-sized pages. Organize related pages into sections and give each section a common template. Scale your pages so that they will fit on a 640 x 480 monitor. Many people still have these smaller monitors and will get aggravated if they have to constantly scroll back and forth.

Be "browser neutral". Design your site using standard html (3.2) so that most people can see everything without having the latest Pentium II or PowerMac G3. Remember that there are still people out there who use the Lynx browser on mainframe terminals. Lynx is text only (no graphics). Using features like Active-X, Java, and Frames greatly limits your audience, unless entertainment is the main goal of your site. Having frames and non-frames versions will double your development and maintenance costs, so also avoid that if you can.

Use a navigation bar as a point of reference. This will help visitors deduce where they are in the site and where to go next. This can be a comforting "signpost" that people come back to when jumping around your site. The web is new to most people and they will benefit from consistent layout and "orientation" features.

Don't make assumptions about the user's environment. Your viewer may have changed font types, sizes or colors. If you create a dark background assuming a certain color of text it may not be readable for some people. In general, avoid changing text or other colors arbitrarily. People get used to blue underlined text for new links and purple for followed links. If you change these just to match a color scheme you have in mind, people may get confused unnecessarily. Lighter backgrounds are usually better and less busy than darker ones.

Forget the "click here" school of web design. Using "click here" is a crutch when your design is not intuitive enough to be understood. If you make organic and functional elements of the site obvious enough they will be understood to be buttons without using "click here." An example is a small sign graphic with the words "More Info." Most people will interpret this as "Click here for more info." Putting the words "click here" on the graphic is redundant. Once you start this you can't stop also. There will be "click here's" all over the page, adding extra confusion and complexity to the site. You don't need this with a good design.

Don't try to be too picky about where items will appear on the page. The user has ultimate control anyway. They can make the window skinny or fat, short or tall and all your great tricks to make things line up perfectly will be for nothing. What's worse, things will really look a mess this way.

Don't try tricks to collect information automatically about your visitors (other than the normal statistics). This will backfire in a big way. Think long and hard before giving away mailing lists or other info to online or direct marketers. There is an etiquette consensus developing on the web of what are acceptable ways of dealing with information submitted online. Give someone who is signing up for something on your site the ability to say they don't want you to send them email notices in the future. If you do have policies to assure the privacy of submitted information, post it on your website. See http://www.truste.org for more info on setting up your own information privacy policy.

Look at what others are doing, and try to separate the good from the bad. See what works and what doesn't for yourself. Some good examples are www.adobe.com, www.yahoo.com, www.moma.org, www.fedex.com, www.3com.com, and www.apple.com.

Not that my house is totally spotless but some local sites that could use work include the following:

www.marshall-redder.com -- Not to pick on Marshall too hard, but the graphics and type are WAY too big, the material is obviously recycled (there are even photos of Marshall backwards) and there is no clear organization to the site or the individual pages. And no, there aren't any listings of properties online, either. A wasted opportunity!

www.saturngr.com -- Gratuitous graphics, HUGE type, uncropped and bad photos, lots of centered type (yuck), recycled content. No real reason to visit this one.

www.americancareers.com -- busy backgrounds, huge logos and graphics, bad e-mail addresses (succeed@americancareers.com), organization lacking, lots of click heres, neverending pages of text. No telling how up to date this site is either, no revision dates for job postings.

If you're not an expert, get help from someone who is. You never see top-flight sites home-built with Microsoft Frontpage, Adobe Pagemill or other html-generators. In fact these are some of the prime exhibits in my "web hall of shame." Read a book if you can't afford to hire an expert. I recommend Laura LeMay's books as a good starting point. Desktop publishing brought poor print design to the masses, the web adds color and multimedia to help neophytes and non-designers really make sites UGLY! The best designers I've met have really thick skin about design critiques and seek honest feedback that their work meets the client's needs.

I hope that this has helped give a basic idea of the do's and don'ts of web site construction without offending too many people. Send questions, comments, flames, and threats to roundfile@tekainc.com.

Theo Gantos is president of TEKA, a technology consulting firm. Contact him: