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Compared to most programming languages, HTML is fairly simple.
However, there are some unusual qiurks to the language which can make designing
effective web pages tricky. The following list contains some of the things which
you should be careful to avoid, and other aspects which you should incorporate
into your layouts.
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Whenever you place an image on a page, always include
the HEIGHT and WIDTH values inside the image tag. This tells the browser which
portion of the screen the image will fill, and the browser will then allocate
the required amount of space immediately. Without these values, the browser must
load the entire image before it can continue to load the rest of the page. |
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For headings, always use popular fonts which the
majority of your audience are likely to have installed on their machines. Otherwise,
a font that is not recognised will be substituted by Times New Roman (a great
font for body text, but perhaps not ideal for standout headlines). |
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Always use GIF images as prefered to JPEGs wherever
possible. GIFs download much faster than JPEGs since GIFs are limited to a palette
of 256 colours (as opposed to JPEGs 16.7 million colours). As the majority of
web surfers are using video cards limited to 256 display colours anyway, you should
only use JPEGs when you have an image (usually a photo or photo based image) which
will not 'survive' the conversion to 256 colours, and you cannont use a 256 colour
image in its place |
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When using background images, make sure that your
background does not blend with any of the text displayed, or heavily distract
your viewer's eye from what they're reading. Most great web sites succeed thanks
to the content they present, and if your background takes the focus away from
your text based content then you should consider changing it. |
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When using Javascript, Active X or Style Sheets,
be aware that not all web users are running browsers which are capable of viewing
these technologies. Rather than forcing web surfers into using the browser you
want them to use, it may be a good idea to create a text based site to accompany
your multimedia-intensive version and let them choose which is more appropriate. |
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When creating long pages with large amount of text,
always use internal links so that users can instantly jump to key areas of the
page without having to scroll though masses of text to find what they want. |
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As a design consideration, don't always use borders
around your tables. The default table borders have been extremely overused in
the past, and frankly they're visually unappealing. Simply add the text border="0"
into your table tag and your page will have a 'cleaner' look. |