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10 Easy Ways to Raise your Search Engine Ranking (Without Raising your Expenses)
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Eight Danger Spots for Beginning Web Designers and How to Avoid Them
Eight Danger Spots for Beginning Web Designers and How to Avoid Them
So you want to be a web designer? It's a delightful field filled with rewarding challenges, and the pay is better than most. If you have what it takes, web design might be the only career you will ever need.
But dark and dangerous times lurk just around the corner. It's a strange world, filled with error messages, bad script, and pages that load differently in every browser. Can you avoid these pitfalls or is your web design career doomed to languish endlessly in the pits of internet despair?
Okay, so that's a bit over-dramatic. Here's a list of some of the top stumbling blocks that can trip first-time designers.
Avoid nesting multiple tables within each other. If your site has a table in a table in a table, you probably have too many. It makes the code ugly and the site difficult to manipulate later. Few things cause more premature balding in beginning designers.
Unless you are designing a site for tech geeks, avoid the latest flashy gizmos. They raise loading time and may not be compatible with all browsers. If you must be high tech, provide a simple text and image based alternative which can be accessed from the home or entry page.
Don't design your site around a particular font. Websites are actually assembled at the client's end. That means no matter how beautiful the font looks on your page, if they don't have it on their computer, they're probably seeing you in Times New Roman. If the font is a vital part of your page (logo, etc) make it into an image file with alternate text. Don't use this trick too often though or you risk slower load times and trouble with search engines and text-only browsers.
View your site on different browsers, different operating systems and at different resolutions. You'll be surprised how different it looks. Display resolutions are changing all the time. If you design a great site for Internet Explorer at 1600 x 1200 resolution it will probably be a jumbled mess on a computer running Firefox at 800 x 600. When in doubt, build small and leave room for text and tables to expand or shrink.
Don't marry the format. Something that works great for a gardening page is probably completely wrong for a high school. Sit down and design a format suited for your individual audience before you ever write a line of code.
If you must use white font on a colored background, provide a printer friendly version with dark colored text. This can be done fairly easily with cascading style sheets. Also be aware that some browsers may fail to load your background image, leaving your viewers staring at white space.
Avoid discount hosting services from third-world countries. Find out where your host is located before you buy or you will find yourself with fifteen pages to upload and a server that keeps blinking on and offline. That can lead to dropped files, partially uploaded content, and hours of helpless frustration.
Keep track of uploaded files. Once they are off your page, remove them from the server. Otherwise your site will become a bloated monster of dead files, broken links and wrong turns.