Ten Secrets for Building a Winning Web SiteWritten by Andrea Wilson
A professional-looking web site goes a long way to establishing you and your product as legitimate and trustworthy. It doesn't have to be fancy (shouldn't be, actually), but a nice, clean design is essential.1. Keep design simple. Period! 2. Maintain a consistent style throughout so visitors always know they're on same site. This is a very basic rule that must not be ignored. 3. Make sure your design looks decent on older versions of both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Archived versions of these browsers can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.asp? http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive.html 4. Keep web pages uncluttered. White space is GOOD! Don't try to put everything on your Home page. 5. Provide "alt tags" for all images so disabled can use your site. The blind use a special "reader" when they surf web. It reads alt tags of your images. Make alt tag (description) of each image clear. "My new car," tells them almost nothing. "My 2002 silver BMW," tells them a whole lot more. 6. Forget Flash and animated GIFs. If anything moves on your site, it should be VERY subtle and visitor should be able to get away from it or turn it off. Forget scrolling marquee, mousetrails and hopping bunny. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. (However, if statistics prove that a scrolling marquee sells product, ignore this rule! Nothing is written in stone and as a marketer you have to pay attention to what's working today! Check gurus's sites and see what they're doing. Then do it!) 7. Keep graphics to a minimum. Be more concerned that your site loads quickly and contains great content or a terrific sales letter.
| | Advantages for Using FrontPage (Part 2)Written by Robin Nobles and Dave Barry
Another benefit to using FrontPage is being able to create virtual directories with ease. As you know, when you specify a home directory, all of subdirectories beneath home directory automatically become subdirectories of Web site as well. However, you can also designate a folder located elsewhere on system as a subdirectory of site by creating a virtual directory out of it. A virtual directory is a directory or folder on a server that is not in actual server directory structure.Again, Dave created a video on how to create virtual directories using Front Page: http://www.smartcertify.com/seo/iis.asp * If you want to create a database, it’s no problem with FrontPage. It will virtually create a database for you and import data without any database knowledge at all. The program works with Access, SQL, Oracle, and ODBC, and you can set up a SEC- compliant database within 30 seconds and begin working with asp pages with no prior knowledge whatsoever. Click here for Dave’s video on how to create a database using FrontPage: http://www.smartcertify.com/seo/dwizard.asp * To Lee Davies of #1 Internet Marketing (http://www.1-internet- marketing.co.nz), main advantage to FrontPage is that you can so easily manage all your html pages from folders section. For example, "If you were to rename an image, which is something that needs to be done when optimizing, it will rename links to images from every page," he explains. * What I kept hearing again and again as I interviewed users of FrontPage is that FrontPage saves you time in creating Web pages, because it’s so easy to use. Don Hammond with DonOMite (http://www.donomite.com) explains, "Straight HTML pages are a breeze with FP. I know a lot of programmers scoff at using it, but it means I can crank out a basic HTML page in seconds rather than minutes. And when I get paid by job, it means more $/hr to me." * Dawn Rowlett with Web Submission Services (http://www.internetmarketingwebsites.com) explains further: "From first day that I was introduced to FrontPage, I was instantly able to catch on to some of many features because it was so easy to use. I think most beneficial factor to program for me was that I was able to go in and design a page, knowing nothing at all about HTML. I could include hyperlinks, tables, images, change colors, backgrounds, insert text, create paragraphs, etc. with absolutely no background in coding. I was able to do all of this on my first day with program!
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