Things to Think of ...
Creating your own site? This is my own little list of a few things I think you should have in mind. They're not the ten commandments, but I still think they're pretty useful ...
- Learn to code! That's why you should write HTML by hand, so that you know exactly what's happening in the background. If you don't, you'll either get stuck on some silly problem you could have avoided easily or end up with really strange and ugly code. Someone I know built a page using so many table cells his computer crashed on him. Deleting them didn't really affect the look of the page either ... So learn! Get a good book and read it all!
- Optimize your images! Remember the old rule: JPEG for larger, photo-type pictures, GIF for smaller and/or pencil drawn pictures. And, another little hint for someone, in my experience PNG does a worse job compressing many images than GIF does. Try the different formats ans see which works best, recent browsers support all three. And remember that with GIF and PNG you can reduce the colour depth (the number of different colours in an image) pretty much with the right settings and that has huge impact on file size.
- Do it the easy way! Sure, I'm sure going crazy with layers and DHTML has a place somewhere on the web, but don't do it unless you need to! Start with the more basic HTML tags and commands and see if they do the job. This is also a good way to retain cross-browser and backward compatibility. Oh, and check your pages in several browsers and inform visitors on just what they're expected to have to get the most out of your site.
- Update often! A site that stays the same as the decades pass is a pretty boring site. Naturally, depending on the focus of your site, there may be times when there isn't much to say, but at least try.
- Learn to code! Make full use of ALT-elements to describe your images, and set WIDTH and HEIGHT for them too. This makes your site easier to understand for people who are blind/ have poor eyesight and those with images turned off, and it makes your layout look right before your images have loaded too. I'm aware that I haven't done this everywhere on this site, the reason is simply that I have more than 280 HTML files, and there are four image tags for corners on each ...
