DOs and DONTs of Personal Home Pages
August 1995
If you want to know how to use or get any of the tools mentioned in the points
below then you can search the web or send me a mail.
Here are rules that I set for myself when developing a home page.
No Construction Signs.
- Home Pages on the web by definition are deemed to be under construction
always so never have a sign saying Under Construction or those graphics
with a bent-back guy. Those signs were designed for the days of yore when the
web was still coming up and for sites of firms whose site is not up and
seriously want customers to come after a few days.
Small and Fast first page.
- Never ever have a first page (homepage) which loads slow. So if you want
to add that big photograph of yours bungee jumping, reserve it for later
pages. If the first page takes too long people lose interest and move on to
another wave to surf. If you a slow loading page somewhere on your location
they might just skip and read some other page. The best thing to have on your
first page is text with maybe pointers to all the big photographs and
collections.
No gaudy colors.
- All those fancy colors and blinking and flashing stuff is not for
personal home pages. What people look for in home pages in text and associated
material. All that dazzling stuff you can find anywhere on the net so why
hurt some ones eyes with that yellow lettering on purple background. If you
do not actually like plain gray default background you could try something
like what I did. Use a gentle background with tinge of color. I chose a
white background with rainbow dots. Its not so plain and also not so bad too.
Images
- I hate those slow loading graphics. Even though most browsers support
loading text first and then images many are too lazy to configure their browsers
to do it. Have mercy and use thumb nails for images. I never have any images
directly in my text using the IMG tag but I have links to images and I
explicitly say that its an image. Also try to specify the WIDTH and HEIGHT
since this makes the browsers job easier by allowing it to reserve some
space and go ahead and display the text instead of waiting for the header
of the image. At worst if you still insist on using inline images then
for heavens sake at least make them interlaced ( there are many tools which
do this ) so that even while displaying someone can see a rough image and
exit if he/she does not want to see the clear image.
ALT tag
- When they provide an ALT tag as part of IMG etc. tags, make use of it.
ALT tag specifies what to display when the image cannot be displayed for
various reasons. Use it especially for something like all those fancy lines
out on the pages. Say something like ALT="----- ... ---" and browsers will
atleast see some line instead of messy text.
Multi-Browser Compatibility
- Okay! Agreed that guys who do not use Netscape maybe missing a lot of
action. But still have mercy on the poor souls who use other browsers and
especially those poor guys using text browsers like lynx on a modem line.
Just have one look at your pages and see if they appear OK on lynx too.
After all you want everyone to appreciate your home page don't you? I had
a bad experience using the TABLE tag in my page and lynx ended up dead
confused ( I am one of those who sometimes browse the web using T1 link
on a 20 inch color monitor and sometimes over a 1.2K modem on a vt100 ).
Transperant GIFs
- This is one point which makes your page more attractive and is not
essentially an issue of style. When you use a background and use GIFs on the
page with white background, what you see is a square hole on the page around
the colorful GIF image. To avoid this you can use a tool giftrans which
makes your GIF images transperant so wherever you have a white color (or any
light color) the background of the page will show up instead of the background
of the image. Makes your page look neat.
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