Top do's and don't for websites

[Randy H]

A lot of good do'/don'ts listed. JDC makes a lot of good points. One that gets skipped a lot is "load speed". Depending on your target group, there could well be a lot of your audience lost because they are still on dial-up connections, with "last month's" computer. If your target group is major corporations, flash and splash away. But if it is grampa's corn plasters, and he is still on an XT with a 14.4 dial-up, he will never see your site with all the hype and jazz.
I had opportunity to do a minor amount of site-building and hosting a few years back, and as a result, had opportunity to teach web-design at a local co-op program. As a part of the course, each student had to first "develop" a product or service. Then they had to indentify the "target group" that was most likely to access their site, and do a demographics study on them. Locale, income, age group, etc etc(decisive factors in what type computer/ISP they would be affording). THEN, they could start developing their site. For grade, initial page had to load in 10 seconds or less on their target groups identified systems, be visible in a variety of browsers, and entire site was required to fit on a single floppy. If size went over that, they developed a second site, and linked them.

By todays expectations and "patience levels". max of five seconds is probably closer to realistic. Longer than that, and most will leave your site.

[Will Thompson]

I second the notion of NO MUSIC.

Many a night I have woken up the whole house to some STUPID IDIOTS full volume music when accidently clicking on some link.

[kjsphotography]

This is all good advice but I'm wondering how many people actually make any real money via web site sales. All BS aside is anyone out there making more than 2K, 10K, 20K, 50K or more a year? Heck is anyone selling enough to pay for the web site?

Yes. After I built my site and started marketing it I started making sales, as I made it easy to navigate and easy for people to buy my work. I automated everything from the ground up and made the site completely dynamic to keep bringing people back seeing new things all the time. Images show up automatically, journals, etc.. The whole nine yards.

You can make sales but people have to be able to easily purscahse your work and have pages load quickly, if not they are gone as well as your potential sales.

I dont use flash as not everyone is on a DSL or cable modem. Have you ever tried to load a flash page on ISDN or Modems? Some of my collectors are still using older technology and I would hate to lose them because they cant load my site in a timely manner.

And music? If I even see or hear a site with music, I am gone. I hate that more than anything.

Kev

[chris_4622]

JDC,
Nothing complicated there, following rules and standards is a very basic and simple concept, but sadly, there are many sites that do not follow even that bare minimum. Not closing tags, using line breaks for spacing, tables for layout, images without alt attributes instead of headers and headers for styling was a 90's fad among the "good enough" crowd.

This discussion has been very informative.
Images without alt attributes; I have found a number of these on my site. Could you explain this, even though it is a bare minimum standard?

chris

[David A. Goldfarb]

This discussion has been very informative.
Images without alt attributes; I have found a number of these on my site. Could you explain this?

chris

Images should have an ALT text so that the user knows what the image is, in case it doesn't display on their browser for some reason.

[Marko]

This discussion has been very informative.
Images without alt attributes; I have found a number of these on my site. Could you explain this, even though it is a bare minimum standard?

chris

As David noted, the main purpose of the ALT attribute is to provide textual description of the image in case the image cannot be displayed for any reason - incomplete page load, missing image file, images intentionally blocked for a number of reasons, etc.

But it has another growing purpose - even if the image loads fine, it provides alternative content description for screen readers and thus increases the site's accessibility for people with disabilities. Even if people with dissabilities represent a very minor portion of your audience, it is considered good form and good practice to provide accessibility. It is part of a larger standards-comliance and as such benefits your site in the long view.

As a side note, while it is not necessary to have text in the ALT attribute, it is required to have the ALT attribute itself, even empty (as in ALT=""). It is usually left empty when the image has an associated textual legend or explanation or when it serves as decoration rather than content. An empty ALT attribute signals such intent to the screen reader software.

[cyrus]

An image is displayd with this html code:

<img src="image.jpg">

Including the alt tag:

<img src="image.jpg" alt="My Photo">

If the image fails to load, or if the user has set his browser to not display images, or if the user is seeing-impaired and uses a voice browser etc

BUT the additional benefit of alt tags is that it helps your site increase its seach indexing and relevance rankings by allowing more text to be presented in your site.

[Marko]

An image is displayd with this html code:

<img src="image.jpg">

Including the alt tag:

<img src="image.jpg" alt="My Photo">

Which brings up another point, and not just for the image tag: Always include width and height attributes in all tags that use them (images, tables, objects...) even though it may not always be required. Besides being a good practice, it speeds up page rendering by allowing the browser to reserve the needed space on the fly, without wating to load entire page and then having to recalculate all dimensions.

There are also other attributes which may not always be required but whose use is considered good form and also contributes to the overal performance.

P.S. Cyrus, I know you used this as an illustration only, it was simply a good soapbox

[Marko]

As a conclusion, I think it is safe to say that web design (as a general term), like any other profession, has a lot of nuances and fine details that may be considered unimportant and nonessential by the general audience, but they all contribute to the site's performance, behaviour and general "feel".

It is those little but cumulative differences that distinguish a professionally made site from a quick template job, just like a professionally produced photo shoot is easy to tell apart from a happy-snappy session by the boss's secretary. Each "do the job", but to a very different extent.

[chris_4622]

Thanks guys.