Before you begin to build a Web page, browse the Web and find some sites you like that present information/content similar to what you are planning to have on your site. When browsing the Web, look for the style or type of pages you want collect—some ideas that you might want to improve upon. This will help you form a mental picture of what your site should accomplish.
At this point you should consider hiring a company to build your Web site. Ask the companies you talk to what sites they have built. Often each site lists the company that designed it. When you talk to them always ask what else they have done.
Draw a diagram of how you want your site arranged; build a storyboard of your site. You should draw a page for every page that will be on your site. Remember that pages can be very long and can have links to and from locations within a page. Take the time to draw out the links. The time you put in now will help you understand the requirements of your site.
If your site is to be just one page, then life is easy, but you still must decide how much stuff you want to jam into that page. If your Web site is twenty levels deep, you can present almost endless information. Yahoo did a good job of listing connecting pages before they became a search engine. How do you link an arrow straight to the exact location in a site that is several levels deep? Solve that and you will rank with the great designers.
With multiple pages you need to decide if you will use graphics or text in your navigation bar. [A navigation bar is the forward back and home, etc., that you see at the top or bottom of your screen.] If the same graphics are used throughout they will load faster than if every page has different graphics. The graphics should be small.
When you are planning your site think about all the navigation icons. You may want a "Mail" icon, along with "Back," "Continue," and "Home." Try not to use "Cool" or "Under Construction"—people will judge for themselves whether or not your site is cool...and the entire Web is always under construction.
If you're thinking about adding a movie or sound, remember that some or most people will not have that driver loaded and will be unable to play it. If you give them the address to download it, some will do that, but the page needs to stand on its own for the rest of the users, most of whom will not download your special file.
You may want to support a primary browser; for example, 85% of the traffic on the WWWiz site consists of Netscape users. Most of our site is tested on the common browsers. Some of our pages such as Cye's Book List, maintained by Cye Waldman, live at the leading edge of the state of the art. So you may want the latest version of Netscape to enjoy it fully, but it is important to present it that way. Be careful when determining who your audience is going to be.
When writing your text pages, spell out what you mean when describing a link. People will sometimes print your material or run it off-line and it will not make sense, or they might not be using a graphical browser, so "Click Here" won't work. Or as I pointed out above you can write to a specific browser or audience and just not care about the other. It's called attitude. That's the power of the Web— you are the publisher.
Another consideration you need to spend time on is logical vs. physical styles. Logical tags allow the end user to have control over what the text looks like. The end user can control how emphasized text is shown (for example, in bold or italicized boldface, or even red underline). If you want complete control over the text for a particular look and feel, then use physical appearance and you can demand that your audience use a specific browser to see the desired effect.
It is important to check your work/links. There are programs out there that will do that for you and some server/browser combinations are also capable of helping to some degree. GNN, mentioned in this issue of WWWiz, is one that can do a lot of checking for you. If you are not using a program like GNN, then use a program like Spider to check your site for bad links and...
Remember the average home user has a 14.4 modem and has to hang up the phone to order with an 800 number. They also view your work through a 640x480x256 portal to the Web. When you count school and business users more of the screens go to 800x600 and the average speed moves up toward 28.8.
The average user with Netscape 2.0 does not like Frames unless they are very carefully used. Most don't know or forget that the right mouse button will allow them to go back within the frame. If they forget and have moved forward several frames and you don't have a great frame navigator in an adjacent frame you will tick off your users. The big search engines just found this out lately. InfoSeek and Yahoo had frames and so many customers were upset several pages into a search to be thrown out that they ditched their frames. The Web changes so fast that you should check each new feature for this kind of flaw. [Netscape has corrected this frame problem in Navigator 3β so that the Back button now correctly backtracks through the frames—Tech. Ed.]
If you are going to put images online, read about the different ways to do that. There are important things to know such as printing the images last so the person can navigate or read while the images are being loaded. You can load the images in strips as interlaced GIFs which allow the user to know what the picture is before it is fully loaded. Or you can load a black-and-white version prior to the actual color for real speed using Netscape's <LOWSRC>. You will need to know about Transparent GIFs and how to pick between JPEG or GIF when picking picture formats. Use a program with the ability to build the images you need for your Web site. I recommend Paint Shop Pro as a tool for preparing images to go online. A book you might want to check out is Creating Great Web Graphics by Laurie McCanna.
Don't use too many images, though. It can take forever to load on a personal home computer with a 14.4 modem. The odds are good that your intended home viewer has a 14.4 modem and has to hang up the phone to make a phone call.
If you are planning to make money with your Web page, I would recommend that you read "Web Advertising and Marketing" by Paul J. Dowling, Thomas J. Kuegler Jr. and Joshua Teslyman.
There are no secrets on the Web. If you want to know the underlying HTML code of your favorite site, go there and "view" the "source" or, depending on your browser, "view" the "code." Be sure that you see the site like a first-timer. If you go to it regularly, then clear your cache so it will load in the order that a new person would see it.