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Related Articles + Define a site in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Related Links |
Build your own website from scratch. 4. Build the written content, the main body of the site. It is in this stage where your site starts to get complicated. Remember the flowchart you just made? This is where it comes in handy. Check all the different steps in the flowchart and start thinking on what to put on each one. Try to build the most important ones first, you can always come back and edit them later. We were talking about the index page in the last step, so now it is time to discuss the content of it. Most sites have some sort of news bulletin; this is what you see first in the index page. Some other sites have the most popular features handily accessible through the index page. Others have big advertisements on popular features or new features. The key point here is to have whatever is new or hot right in the first page, specifically, in the first 400 pixels. The reason for this is that several studies show that the majority of the web surfers will not stay in a page if they don't see what they are looking for in the first page. If the visitors have to scroll down to find what they want they might not stay as well. Following the above tip, it is important that your homepage or your index page is clear, readable and not cluttered with ads or irrelevant content. The main features of your index page and of your site should be easily seen and quickly found. This advice extends to all other pages, though some deeper (in the flowchart) more specific ones might break some of these rules. Some sites like to have a Flash intro in their main index page, this is a big NO. It drives many visitors away. And if the whole site is Flash and it takes more than a minute to load, nobody will ever stay that long. This guides us to the next key point, loading time. Even if your page has many images and a cute or fancy layout, if it takes 5 minutes to load nobody will ever see it. So the most important thing to remember is to keep it FAST. How do you do this? When you design the layout, make sure to render all your images small in size. Preferably make them GIF images. The whole layout should be under 50 kB if you want it to be really fast. Another technique that helps is reusability. If you use the same images for the entire site's layout, the visitor might have them in cache and it will speed up the loading time. It is important that they are the same images and not similar images but in different locations. For example: http://www.foobar.com/images/foo.gif is not the same as http://www.foobar.com/foo/images/foo.gif and will not be the cached image either. At this stage it may not be as important to write all the content that will be displayed in the site, but it is vital to draw the outlines of most if not all content so that it can be finished later on. It may be a good thing to let some spaces open for features that you might want to add later. Try to think of all the features you would like to have and leave some space if possible for them. Although you might not implement them right away it is easier to fill in the gaps later than trying to make more space in an already cluttered page. Just remember to keep matters simple and clear, you can always add the finishing touches and revisions before publishing, what is most important at this stage is to solidify the content and the design in general terms. |
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