|
|
|
|
|
|
Web Development Guidelines - page 3
author: Martin "mpot" Pot
date: 19 October 2004
navigation:
<prev
| 1
| 2
| 3
| next>
Promoting Your Website
Search Engines
One of the easiest way to attract visitors to your website is to submit it to various search engines. Most search engines allow you to submit websites at no cost. Note that it will typically take a week or so before the search engine bot will visit your site, and another week or more before your website will show up in search results.
Search Engine Friendly
Ensure your website is search-engine friendly. Most of the major search engines provide detailed information for webmasters, with recommendations for making your website search-engine friendly.
In particular, avoid the use of frames, ensure a login is not required for pages which you want indexed by search engines, and use a robots.txt file to limit access to specific content on your website if desired.
Search engines typically rank websites based on numerous factors, and the more links to your website from other websites, the higher the rank.
Website Links
Look for other websites with similar content, and try emailing the webmasters of those sites, requesting that they link to your site. In most cases, webmasters will want a reciprocal link, so be prepared to add links to your website.
Forums and Mailing Lists
If posting regularly to web forums or mailing lists, add a link to your website in your signature. However, be very wary of spamming web forums or mailing lists inappropriately with plugs for your website, as this just serves to annoy people.
Maintenance
Check Source Validity
Check the HTML and CSS on your website for validity using the free
HTML validation and
CSS validation
checks available at
www.w3.org.
These allow you to ensure your HTML and CSS adheres to the standards, and thus should be rendered properly by modern browsers, as different browsers tend to render broken HTML/CSS unpredictably.
Check Links
Periodically check your website for broken links. This ensures all the internal navigation within your website is functional, as well as checking any external websites that you are linking to.
There are numerous applications and sites which can do this, and I use the freeware
Xenu Link Sleuth.
Use CSS
Rather than hard coding the visual elements of each page in the page itself, use CSS to define the text and heading colours and styles. This ensures a consistent look and feel across the website, and means you can easily change any of these properties by updating the CSS style sheet.
Web Templates
Use of web templates or a content management system (CMS) can significantly simplify administration and maintenance of a website. These typically allow you to define the layout, banner images, menu structure, footer, etc, in a single location, with the changes taking effect immediately across the entire website.
I typically use some custom Perl templates that I've developed, as I've written them to specifically meet my needs. They provide functionality to allow multiple template "looks" (ie, the top banner, side borders, menu, etc) on a single site, and allow menus to be easily updated with minimal effort.
Monitor Hits
Monitor webpage hits on your website. If you don't have access to the raw webserver logs where your website is hosted, or if these logs don't provide sufficient detail, then use some server-side script in each page to write details to a log file or database.
Most of my websites are written in Perl, and I use some Perl script (built into my templates), linked into each page, to log this information to a text file, and download the file each month for analysis.
As a minimum, I'd recommend logging the following information:
- date/time (ie, when the page is being viewed)
- web page (ie, the page being viewed)
- referrer (ie, where the visitor is being referred from; typically a webpage linking to your website)
- user agent (ie, browser name, version, OS details, etc)
- ip address of visitor
Monitor Referrers
Monitoring the referrers allows you to identify which websites are linking to yours, as well as providing an indication of the number of hits from web search engines, as well as the keywords people are using in those search engines.
Monitor User Agent
Tracking the user agent gives useful information about the web browsers being used, as well as the operating systems being used by your visitors.
Based on this information, you can identify the common web browsers being used, and thus ensure you test the operation of your website in these browsers.
Moving Home?
If you need to move your website to a different domain name, or you are migrating it from an ISP-hosted location to a domain name, where possible, setup appropriate user-friendly redirect messages at the old address, with a link to the new location. This ensures visitors using bookmarks or links to the old address can still get to your website at its new address.
In most cases, using .htaccess redirects isn't necessarily the best way to handle this, as the auto-redirect will cause the visitor to be redirected to the new address without noticing that they have been redirected. As a result, your visitors are unlikely to update their bookmarks and/or notify the webmasters of any sites linking to the old address.
Logging all hits to the redirection pages allows you to monitor which websites are linking to the old address, thus allowing you to notify the webmasters of those sites, requesting them to update their links.
Advertising
If using advertising on your website, there are some guidelines to ensure it doesn't impact the visitor's experience too much.
Avoid Popups
Popup windows are definitely to be avoided, as they are a source of annoyance for all visitors. Most recent web browsers provide support for blocking popup windows anyway.
Location
Advertisements which cover page content are also not recommended, as they typically require some user-interaction before the visitor can view the page content. Various iterations of Geocities watermark advertising are guilty of this.
I'm very wary of placing advertisements inline in the text of the page, particularly if using colours and fonts to the page text. This serves to confuse the visitors, as there's no clear distinction between the page content and the advertisements.
Soliciting Clicks
Care must be taken if you specifically request visitors to click the advertisements displayed on your website, as this can be in violation of the advertiser's policy. Be sure to read the advertiser's policy carefully, to ensure that you are complying with all aspects of it.
Summary
In summary, if using advertising, it should not be too intrusive, as you don't want it to get in the way too much, thus affecting the visitor's experience negatively.
However, you will need to compromise, as you still want the visitors to notice and view the advertising on your website.
Allowing Feedback
Contact Details
It's important that you have contact details available on your website, to allow visitors to contact you. Ideally, have a page listing contact details, and any other methods that visitors can use to get in contact with you. A link to this page should be available on every page on your site, with the logical place for such a link being in the footer of each page.
Having contact details easily accessible ensures visitors can easily provide feedback and/or suggestions, as well as reporting issues with the content on the site, ie, broken links.
Feeling Shy?
If you are reluctant to publicise your email address on your website, as a minimum, provide a web form that visitors can use to submit feedback. Ensure this form is functional, as there is nothing more annoying than trying to submit feedback using a form, only to find the form is not functional.
Learn and Improve
Look to Improve
Always be on the lookout for ways in which you can improve your website. There's lots of articles and tutorials available on the web which can provide valuable information on developing and designing websites.
Seen Something Nice?
When browsing other websites, and you see something that you might want to use on your website, there's nothing stopping you from looking at the HTML source of the page, or the CSS style sheet. Note that there's no way you can look at any server-side code, but you can certainly look at the resulting HTML output.
Copyright
Be sure to adhere to any copyright policies on the sites where you might be wanting to re-use some of their code.
Conclusions
While this article was not intended to be a comprehensive set of guidelines for web developers, it has provided some general guidelines and recommendations that can be used when designing and administering websites.
And finally, if something on another website annoys you, avoid implementing the same thing on your own website, as it's likely to annoy visitors to your website.
navigation:
<prev
| 1
| 2
| 3
| next>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
