How to create Web sites easily

The most complete guide for the Web page builder
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Tips and tricks

Hey! A page like this wouldn't be complete if we didn't have the Tips and tricks section. I wanted to give you a few advices to help you in the creation of your page:

A few advices on style improvement

Pay attention to grammar and spelling. Most probably a bad spelling or non-understandable text will lead the visitor to confusion, primarily, and could even cause the reader to get discouraged and leave your page. Proofread every page whenever possible, and try to get a friend to check your page and tell them your opinion. Maybe you have gotten too close to your pages and can't judge them objectively.
One word: consistency. Keep your formatting constant across your pages, and if you write a word like E-mail, with a big E and a - on the word, ALWAYS do it the same way on the rest of your pages. That helps the reader get closer to the text and understand better, and gives a professional look to your site.
Try not to put enormous graphics on your page. Look, a lot of people (including me) get annoyed when we have to load a page full of graphics and nothing of text. The graphic load on a page could look pretty cool when entirely loaded, but it does make the scrolling and loading of the page slow. As you noticed, the loading of my pages is slow by now, although I have tried to reduce the graphic content of my page. The graphics in the main navigation bar are about three kilobytes in size, and interlaced. The ads are not bigger than 7KB. The biggest elements in my pages are the background musics, which are up to 35 Kbytes, but I think they are cool. Normal, common, ordinary, popular, 99% web surfers cancel the loading of a page if they see too many graphics in it. Try to use text effects to avoid graphics whenever possible.
Don't abuse on animated images and marquees. One or two of them can look good, but filling a page with animated GIFs or marquees will for sure drive anyone crazy and take him immediately out of the page.
Test your background graphics before you put them. Maybe the background you're trying to put looks cool when you watch it on its own, but it can render your page impossible to read, or generate a terrible pattern effect when tiled.
Test your graphics on a 256-color display. If you are using a high-color display, you probably haven't noticed, but the buttons of the main navigation bar dither. I am working on the correction, but if you can't avoid that, at least verify the text on your images reads correctly. Also, try to use solid colors on your page.
Keep the formatting consistent. At least on Internet Explorer, you can use stylesheets to keep formatting constant across the whole project and in every page. But if you want to make it compatible, then test carefully your pages for errors, mismatchs, non-working links, or small formatting inconsistencies. Those errors do cause a feeling of discomfort on the reader.
The background music: keep it moderate. Don't drive your visitors crazy by obligating them to listen to your favorite song, just choose the appropiate one for the occasion.
Check the colors of your page. I have seen a lot of pages on which, for example, the background color is bright yellow, and the text is white. Readable? Nah, I guess not. It just gave me a headache.

Remember: you can take them or you can leave them. But I would suggest you to follow these advices; you'll get by far more visitors to your page, especially if the theme of your page is a very popular one, and if you have complete information over it, and if you have advertised your site on other pages and search engines. If you'd like to get more information about HTML authoring, check at the bottom of this document, there you'll find a bunch of useful and interesting links.

Tips to optimize your work while editing and previewing

NEW TIP: Always use the View Source code on every cool page you visit, to learn how did the page developer(s) do to create the effect you liked. Pay attention, though, that you should NOT copy everything just because it seems cool - the codes and the formats are not copyrighted, but the contents could be!

TIP: Need material for your work? Try surfing the cache of your browser (a directory storing temporary files - usually data files, documents, graphics and music put there for faster access) and check for new graphics, backgrounds and stuff you'd like to put on your page. Remember, though, that some material might be copyrighted and protected by federal laws.

TIP: when editing your files, keep a browser window open with the file you're editing, and your favorite plain-text editor open with the document, so that when you make some changes to the file, you just save it, and then hit RELOAD on the browser. You'll get instant preview of what you're doing!

TIP: Whenever you find an interesting page, but don't know how to replicate its effects, use the View Source Code feature of your browser and check for the code, then copy it on your page!

For your FTP uploads

TIP: on a PC system with MS-DOS or Windows, use the modified file attribute to know whether a file needs updating. You have all your files in a single directory, don't you? OK, before FTPing, check which files have been modified. Then, upload only these. Afterwards, turn off the modified attribute with the ATTRIB *.* -A command issued in MS-DOS, in the folder where the files were located. That way, if a file changes, you'll know. See your DOS manual for more information about this, or contact a DOS expert, if you don't know what the hell I am talking about.

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