Your web site on Net is your virtual office - it represents you on Information Superhighway, where traffic moves at a lightening speed, and within a couple of seconds a particular web site has to catch fancy of surfer. And since there are thousands of choices for a surfer, he/she just has to click mouse button to move to next web site.

Frankly, I would never like to address casual future web master. I assume if you are reading this article, you mean business, you mean to do business from your web site. It's like your real-world office. Wouldn't you spend time on planning and designing of your brick and mortar office? People even hire outside interior designers to come up with a quality office.

Same applies to your virtual office. People are going to come, if they like surrounding, they'll linger on, and if they appreciate what you are trying to convey, they would preferably like to do business with you. If you plan to do business, your virtual office is as important as your real-world office, more if you want to attract international clientele.

You cannot design a web site in an atmosphere of isolation, or as a le Castaway. Talk to people around you, talk to your friends, ask them what's their experience on Net, what sort of designs they like or dislike.

So what are factors you should take into consideration while laying out your plan?

Start from end result.

In age we are today, things change fast in Internet and so if you are to keep up with your customers and to make maximise profits as a webmaster, you must be able to design and re-design your website to reflect message you pass to your customers.

Sometimes waiting for your website designers take ages to effect this changes which you could have been able to do quietly from your home or office without having to pay lots of money to web designers and wait on queue to get to your turn before change can be effect. These delays result in loss of sales most of time.

There is no way I will ever buy anything from a web site that has missing images or broken links. I mean, if this webmaster doesn't care about his web site, he probably could care less about his customers.

Getting your web site to look good can sometimes be a hair-pulling experience. Even for me, and I have been making web sites for over 5 years. I can only imagine how frustrated many newbies can get.

Let me share with you some of common problems in designing a well-functioning web site. If you haven't made these mistakes yet - trust me: you will! Keep this troubleshooting guide handy for when you need it (and save some of your hair, too!)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1. MISSING IMAGES ON THE PAGE 2. IMAGE LOADS VERY SLOWLY 3. IMAGE LOOKS DISTORTED 4. BROKEN LINKS 5. TEXT IS MISSING ON THE PAGE 6. VISITORS CAN'T SEE YOUR FANCY FONTS 7. TOO MUCH HORIZONTAL SCROLLING REQUIRED 8. THE TABLE IS WIDER THAN SPECIFIED 9. WEB PAGE DISPLAYS OLD LINKS AND IMAGES 10. BACKGROUND DOESN'T SHOW 11. CAN'T ACCESS YOUR HOME PAGE ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PROBLEM 1: MISSING IMAGES ON THE PAGE

SOLUTION: There are three things that might cause this problem. You have either forgotten to upload image to your web server, didn't link to it correctly, or graphic is in invalid format.

1) Remember, you need to upload all graphics that you are using on your web page, just like any other file. So if you have a "services.html" page that contains "staff.jpg" graphic, you need to upload both "services.html" and "staff.jpg" to your web server.

2) You also need to reference that image correctly. For this, you need to understand a little bit about files, folders, and directories. Basically, a file is a document. A folder (or a directory) is a collection of files.

You might have a directory on your web site called "images". Inside it you might have "staff.jpg", "logo.jpg", and other files. Now, here is trick: if your HTML file is located in same folder with graphic it contains, then here is how you refer to that image:

So far, simple, right? But let's say that your HTML file is located in main directory, while graphic file is located in sub-directory. For example, "services.html" is located in root directory of your web site so that if you type www.yoursite.com/services.html in your browser location bar, you will see it.

And let's say that you placed a graphic used on that page into a sub-directory called "images", so that when you type www.yoursite.com/images/graphic.jpg into your browser location bar, you will see that image. So how do you refer to that graphic from your "services.html" page? Here is how:

All I did was put sub-directory (or folder) name followed by a forward slash before graphic name.

Finally, what if you put an HTML page into a sub- directory, but leave image in main (root) directory? For example, your "services.html" is located in a sub-directory called "pages". And graphic used on it, "staff.jpg", is placed in main directory, so that when you type this address into your browser location bar, you will see it: www.yoursite.com/staff.jpg How do you refer to this graphic on your "services.html" page? You use "previous directory" notation like this: The browser will then know, that in order to find that graphic it needs to look in one directory below. If you are having trouble understanding above notation, use absolute image references. For example:

Make sure you know where you placed your graphic (which folder) and refer to it as if you were accessing it from your web browser. That's it!

3) And finally, if you are not using graphics with "JPG" or "GIF" extension, they will not appear on your web page. Use PaintShop Pro or any other graphic editor download.com) to convert your graphic from any format to "JPG" or "GIF". Broken images may also happen even if they don't have right extension. That's because they have been created in a not-for-web format. When a graphic artist designs your logo, remind her to save it as "RGB" (which stands for "red-green-blue") or "Indexed Color" and not any other color mode (such as "CMYK"). For more information, see "Choosing right format for your images" at http:/ ech.irt.org/articles/js206/index.htm PROBLEM 2: IMAGE LOADS VERY SLOWLY