These essential tips will help you keep your site looking good and easy to maintain and update.
Get Organised
Your
computer hard drive is like a drawer in a filing cabinet. Inside the cabinet are folders that
contain your documents other files and sub folders. The server at your ISP is set up in a similar
manner. So organise your web site before you go too far. You may have a number of pages related to
different topics so you could put them in folders, for example: news, diary, social, etc; and
another folder for images. Paid hosts will allow you to have many levels of folders, but free hosts
may limit you to one level or to just the main domain level.
Index Files
Your
first page is usually called index.html or default.html,
depending on how your host has set up the server. This will be the page that the browser downloads
by default if a particular page is not specified in the URL. It is best to put an index.html (or
default.html) in all sub-folders (sub-directories) that will be displayed by default if a specific
page is not specified in the URL.
File Names
Best
practice is to use all lowercase letters for file names. The web host computer server where your
site content is stored does not work the same as a PC. It will discriminate between lower and
uppercase characters. So it would be possible to have files named FILE.HTML
and file.html in the same folder or directory.
Only use letters, numbers and the underscore character _ in file names. If you put a space in a file name consider replacing the space with the underscore like this: file_name.html. Some servers will accept other characters, but if you have used a character that your server does not recognise, you will have to change every file name and associated hyperlink on your site that contains the character!
HTML files will be recognised if you save them with the extension htm or html. It is best to choose one and stick to it, as the server will consider file.htm and file.html to be different file names.
Make your file names meaningful. For example this file is called "essential.html", that gives a clue about its content, much better than, say "page2.html".
Fonts
The
fonts you specify in your page design have to be installed on the computer
that is running the browser, so avoid using lots of fonts that other people might not have. If you
want to use a special font for a title create a GIF or JPEG image file for the heading.
Hyperlinks
Provide
hyperlinks in documents to other related documents and topics. Also remember to give your viewer an
easy way to get to your index or home page, or a page with links to your main pages. Make sure you
enter the URL's carefully. If you make a typing mistake your link will be broken, i.e. it will not
work! You may also find that a link to a document on someone else's site is broken, probably
because they renamed or re-wrote their web pages.
Check Your Code
Before
you upload your pages check that everything works. Open your pages in the web browser on your PC
and check the hyperlinks work between pages and that all the images display properly. When you have
done this upload the pages to the server and then test the links again to make sure that everything
still works.
Encourage Visitors
Now
all you need is for someone to visit your site. There are some suggestions on how to
get your site noticed.