Creating a Website 02: Best Practices

[Mimi58]

The Right Way and the Wrong Way

Each web designer has his or her own opinions what is most important. Below, you'll find a few practices that many consider important:

Importance of Navigation

No matter the size of your website, your visitors will need a way to get around to see what is there. A small site might have a main navigation menu that links to every page. A larger website might have links to your main section pages on every page and have special menus on certain pages.

Links can become broken over time. w3schools.org has tool to check for broken links: http://validator.w3.org/checklink

Images
Resolution

It's a good idea to resize and/or optimize images used on a website to reduce the time it takes a page to load. There are online sites where you can optimize an image. There are also some free graphic editors you can download. Link to List http://computerscs.com/graphicsmore.html

Setting Width and Height

You may have visited a website that seems to jump around when the page is loading. Generally this is because the width and height of an image has not been specified. So, the browser redoes the page as each image loads. If you specify the size of the image in your code, the browser will layout the page with space set aside for each image, so the page load is much smoother.

Some HTML editors will automatically add the width and height when you insert an image. If you are coding by hand, you can add the width and height to your image tags.

Adding an alternate name

It's recommended to add alternate text to certain image tags. If that's done and an image doesn't load for some reason, an alternate text will appear telling what the image would have been. More importantly, it helps with accessibility for visitors who are using screen readers, etc.

What do you think of the list? Do you have and questions or some tips to share about best practices?