The internet
has become an integral part of our lives. Everyday more
and more websites are going online. With the advent
of online sitebuilders included with many hosting packages,
anyone can easily create a web presence and feel comfortable
knowing that the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
editor is pretty simple to learn. You don't need to
know how to write HTML because the sitebuilding software
generally has a word processing type of interface and
all you need to do is pop things in here and there.
But soon you'll realize that there are many limitations
to what you can and can't do. If you're satisfied with
these limitations, then nothing anyone says will matter.
Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is freedom. Freedom
to create a website exactly the way you want it to look
and perform the way you want it to perform. Of course,
there's more to web design than writing HTML (Hyper
Text Markup Language) code and putting pretty pictures
on a webpage. It takes time, skill and patience to master
the concepts needed in order to create an effective
website.
I've listed at least nine items that I feel you must
know a little bit about before seriously embarking on
designing a website. They aren't listed in any particular
order of importance as each web designer has his/her
own opinion as to the importance of each one.
HTML. One must learn the HTML language, which is not
difficult, but nevertheless a necessity, since this
is the only way that the browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer,
Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera, etc.) will be able
decipher the code in order to view a webpage. There
are numerous places to learn HTML for free on the internet.
The one place I would recommend would be to go to the
W3C website. Here is where all the standards are written.
You can find them located here http://www.w3schools.com/.
CSS. It would be a big advantage for you to learn CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets). CSS gives you total control
over the style and layout of your webpages. By learning
CSS, you would only need to edit one file in order to
make some changes in all of your pages. You wouldn't
have to go into each webpage separately to change fonts,
or background colors and images. It's really kind of
neat when you think about how much you can do with the
inclusion of just one or two lines. I like to call it
my 'magic file' because that's what it does...it performs
magic instantly!
TITLES, META TAGS and KEYWORDS. There has been volumes
written about these items. But for my purpose here,
I will just mention what each are and where they're
located. Suffice it to say that knowing a bit about
each one will only enhance your learning experience
in designing an effective webpage. Every webpage or
HTML document must have a title. The title should be
representative of what your website is about. It is
located between the "head" and "/head" area at the top
of your document. HTML tags which describe the content
of a webpage and utilized by search engines are called
META Tags. They provide useful information to the search
engines such as Author, Copyright, Description, Expirations,
Language, Keywords and Robots. There are others but
those are the basic ones used. One of the more important
META Tag used is the Keyword META Tag. This is where
you put your specific keywords and key phrases. The
keywords you choose which best describes your webpage
is what the search engines look for. They also notice
how often these keywords and key phrases are used within
the webpage. One must be careful how the keywords are
used because too many and it's considered spamming the
search engines, too few and they aren't even noticed.
DOCTYPE. DOCTYPE is short for "Document Type Definition",
or, DTD, and it informs the web browsers which version
of (X)HTML you are using in order to process it. The
DOCTYPE must appear at the very top of every webpage
that you design. You can check W3C's webpage here at
http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html
for a list of recommended DOCTYPE's.
COPYRIGHT INFO. You can find out all about the copyright
laws here at http://www.copyright.gov/, but what it
basically boils down to is - if you didn't write it,
you will need approval of the person who did in order
to use it within your website, or there could be real
problems for you with copyright infringements. It's
against the law to take what someone else wrote and
pass it off as your own. This goes for everything from
photo's, clip art, designs, website templates to articles
and website content.
CONTENT. I'm sure you've heard the statement that "Content
Is King". What this means is that whatever you write
within your website (the content), not only does it
have to be original but it should possess a number of
your keywords and key phrases. These keywords and key
phrases should fit in within the content and make sense
with whatever it is you're writing about. This content
will not only explain to any visitor what you're website
is all about, it will be used by the search engine's
that rate how important your content is in relation
to the keywords listed.
LINKS. Links within your website are important, whether
you're linking to other websites or other websites are
linking to you. However, with Google's new update "Jagger",
Google is placing more importance on credibility and
added-value, rather than the amount of links you have.
Google continues to change their algorithms by which
websites are rated and it's becoming almost comical
that many a website owner must scramble to figure out
the best way to make changes in order to either keep
their high rankings or even get noticed. It will be
interesting to watch what happens here.
VALIDATION. There is much to be said about being validated.
There are some web designers that feel it's not important,
but know that I feel that it's extremely important.
What exactly does 'being validated' mean? Simply put,
it means that the coding of your website has passed
the test in utilizing the W3C conformance standards
by which web documents have been written. It places
no value on the content, just the HTML or XHTML structure.
There is also a validation service for passing the CSS
(Cascading Style Sheet) conformance standards. Both
of these services are provided for free by the W3C (World
Wide Web Consortium).
SEO. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the key
factor by which your website will be rated by Google,
MSN, Yahoo or any of the other search engines. Quite
simply it's optimizing your website for the search engines
to notice you. Again, the importance is placed on content.
There are many SEO companies that promise high rankings,
or worse, they promise you number one ranking if you
hire them to optimize your website. Be wary of anyone
that makes those statements. Know that there is no possible
way for them to make such promises because there is
no way to know how a website will rank. You can submit
your own URL to some of the major search engines yourself
at no cost. Now whether or not you get noticed is another
story entirely, but know that eventually your website
will be indexed by the various robot programs that most
search engines use anyhow.
In summary, there is much to consider when designing
a website. It's not an easy task and the importance
of the items I've listed should not be ignored. It also
takes a bit of ingenuity and creativeness in addition
to the semantics, but with practice, patience and knowledge,
it can be done.
Diane
Dickler is the owner of http://www.dironwebdesign.com/ where
she specializes in creating and hosting websites for
her clients. |
