Once you know exactly what you intend
to publish and who the targeted audience will be, the
next step is to determine the mood of your website. Should
the ambience be informal, professional or high tech? Will
you use graphics, animation or music? How will the text
be structured and which fonts will be used? How will visitors
navigate through your site? Whatever you
decide, try to maintain the same theme and conventions throughout
your site.
The most important part of your website is
the textual content. What you write should add value and
make the visitor want to return. Review your web page
objectives and your target audience and make your message
suit that audience. Don't forget to check your spelling and grammar
before publishing your pages. There are a few tricks to
keep in mind regarding word repetition, use of headers
and titles but these will be discussed later. At this
point, focus on content!
Publishing on the net is different from
writing for a newspaper in that you are able to take
advantage of multimedia capabilities. Photos, graphics, music and video can
make your site interesting. Be careful, however, not to overdo it. Graphics, for
example are often large files that take time to
download. Most people won't wait more than five seconds
for a web page to load.
Don't forget that people use many different types of personal computers, modems and
versions of software. A web
page that loads quickly on your machine might not function quite as well on another. When writing web pages, the golden rule is: small is
beautiful!
You can find graphics for your home
page on the web by searching for "Index of GIF
files" or "GIF library". When you
find something you like, copy it to a directory on your
hard drive by right clicking on the graphic and selecting
"save picture as". To find appropriate music,
search for "midi" and the name of the singer
or composer. The names of these two file types terminate
with ".gif" and ".mid". If you
suspect that a graphic or song is copyrighted, you should
ask permission from the owner before using it.
To keep life simple, all pictures, animations, graphics,
music, etc. that you plan to use on your home page should be stored in the same directory as your main HTML program
file. If you haven't already done so, create a directory
on your hard drive to consolidate all the software components that you
will use on your page.
The use of tables to group and align
text can help make a page more attractive. Tables are
fast to load and are easily generated from most HTML
Editors. The spacing between table cells and the borders around
the cells can be altered or made invisible. Text and
graphics within table cells can be right justified, left
justified or centered.
