Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Planning a Website

The last thing you need before you start building a website is to be buried under an avalanche of theory. However, every new web author can save time and effort by doing a little bit of planning beforehand. In the following sections, you’ll consider some quick guidelines to get you on the right path.

Types of Sites

You don’t have much chance of creating a successful site if you haven’t decided what it’s for. Some people have a very specific goal in mind (like getting hired for a job or promoting a book), while others are just planning to unleash their self-expression. Either way, take a look at the following list to get a handle on the different types of websites you might want to create:

• Personal sites are all about you. As the world gets more web-savvy, it seems everyone is building online homes. Whether it’s to share pictures of Junior with the relatives, chronicle a trip to Kuala Lumpur, or just post your latest thoughts and obsessions, a personal website is the place to do it.

  When you design a personal website, it’s up to you how ambitious you want to be. If all you need is a hub to chat with friends or a place to share pictures, you can save yourself a good bit of trouble by signing up on a social network like Facebook (www.facebook.com). Or, if you want a diary-like site to chronicle your life, work, or obsessive hat-collecting hobby, a personal blog may suit you fine (see, for instance, www.blogger.com, which is discussed in Chapter 13). If you’re a bit more ambitious (say you want to chart five generations of family history), or you want complete design control (forget Facebook blue), or you just need a single web home to gather together several interests, then a customized personal website is the mark of an individual with true style.

• Résumé sites are a specialized type of personal site and a powerful careerbuilding tool. Rather than photocopy a suitcase full of paper résumés, why not send emails and distribute business cards that point to your online résumé? Best of all, with a little planning, your online vita can include more details than its tree-based counterpart, like links to former companies, an online portfolio, and even background music playing “YMCA” (which is definitely not recommended).

• Topical sites focus on a particular subject that interests you. If you’re more interested in building a website about your favorite music, art, books, food, political movement, or American Idol contestants than you are in talking about your own life, a topical website is for you.

  Before you set out to create a site, consider whether other people with a similar interest will want to visit it, and take a look at existing sites on the topic. The best topical websites attract others with the same interest. The worst websites present the same dozen links you can find anywhere else. Remember, the Web is drowning in information. The last thing it needs is another Megan Fox Fan Emporium.

• Event sites aren’t designed to weather the years—instead, they revolve around a specific event. A common example is a wedding website. The event hosts create it to provide directions, background information, links to gift registries, and a few romantic photos. When the wedding is over, the site disappears—or morphs into something different (like a personal site chronicling the honeymoon). Other events you might treat in a similar way include family reunions, costume parties, or do-it-yourself protest marches.

• Promotion sites are ideal when you want to show off your personally produced CD or hot-off-the-presses book. They’re geared to get the word out about a specific item, whether it’s handmade pottery or your own software. Sometimes, these websites evolve into small-business sites, where you actually sell your wares (see the “Small business” bullet below).

• Small business (or e-commerce) sites show off the most successful use of the Web—selling everything from portable music players to prescription drugs. E-commerce sites are so widespread that it’s hard to believe that when the Web was first created, making a buck was far from anyone’s mind.

  Creating a full-blown e-commerce site like Amazon.com or eBay is far beyond the abilities of a single person. These sites need the support of complex programs and computer genius–level programming languages. But if you’ve come to the Web to make money, don’t give up hope! Innovative companies like PayPal and Yahoo provide services that can help you build shopping cart–style sites and accept credit card payments. You can also host Google ads or hawk products from Amazon’s website to rake in some cash. You’ll learn about these great tricks in Chapter 14.

Once you pinpoint your website’s raison d’être, you should have a better idea about who your visitors will be. Knowing and understanding your audience is crucial to creating an effective site. (And don’t even try to suggest you’re creating a site just for yourself—if you were, there’s no reason to put it on the Internet at all!)

The Lifespan of Your Site

The Web constantly changes. Today’s Web isn’t the same as last year’s—or even the Web of 15 seconds ago.

Here are two valuable truths about website lifetimes:

• The best websites are always improving. Their creators add support for new browser features, tweak their look to match new style trends, and—most important of all—constantly add new content.

• When a website stops changing, it’s on life support. Many great websites have crumbled through neglect.

Think about your favorite sites. Odds are, they change daily. A good website isn’t one you consult once and leave behind. It’s a site you bookmark and return to periodically. In a sense, a website is like a television channel. If its creators aren’t adding new information, the site is showing reruns.

Creating a website is hard enough, and keeping its content fresh is even more taxing. Here are a few tips that can help you out:

• Think in stages. When you put your first website online, it won’t be complete. Instead, think of it as version 1, and start planning a few changes for the next version. Bit by bit, and stage by stage, you can add everything you want your site to have.

• Select the parts you can modify regularly, and leave the rest alone. There’s no way you can review and revise an entire website every week. Instead, your best strategy is to identify sections you want to change regularly. On a personal site, for example, you might put news on a separate page and update just that page. On a small-business website, you might concentrate on the home page so you can advertise new products and upcoming specials.

• Design a website that’s easy to change. This is the hardest principle to follow, because it requires not only planning, but a dash of hard-won experience. As you become a more experienced web author, you’ll learn how to simplify your life by making your pages easier to update. One method is to separate information into several pages, so you can add new content without reorganizing your entire site. Another is to use style sheets to separate page formatting from your content (see Chapter 6). That way, you can easily insert new material without having to format the content from scratch to match the rest of your page.

Practice Good Design

Every year, hundreds of websites “win” awards for being abjectly awful. Sometimes, the profiled sites have spinning globes and hot pink text on a lime-green background. Other times, they have clunky navigation systems and grotesque flashing backgrounds. But no matter what the design sins, websites that are bad—hideously bad—are strangely common.

Maybe it’s because creating a website really isn’t that hard. Or maybe it’s because we all have an impulse to play with color, texture, and sound, and fancy web tools encourage our ugliest instincts. For a glimpse at some of the all-too-familiar mistakes, go to www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs (see Figure 1-3). You can also visit www.worstoftheweb.com, which profiles new offenders every month.

Figure 1-3. Here’s a website that gets it all wrong—deliberately. With a combination of scrolling titles, a crazily blinking background, and unreadable text, www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs does a good job of demonstrating everything you should avoid on your own web pages.

This book won’t teach you to become a professional web designer. However, it will help you learn the critically important art of Not Making Bad Websites. Throughout this book, you’ll find helpful tips, suggestions, and warnings about usability and design issues (look specifically for the “Design Time” boxes). In the meantime, here are a few general principles that can help make sure you never wind up on a worst-of-the-Web list (unless you absolutely want to):

• Keep it simple (and don’t annoy your visitors). You can cram a lot of frills and goodies into a web page. But unless they serve a purpose, just say no. You’ll find that exercising restraint can make a few fancy touches seem witty and sophisticated. Adding a lot of fancy touches can make your site seem heady and delusional. If you pare down the tricks, you’ll make sure that your graphical glitz doesn’t overshadow your site’s content and drive your visitors away in annoyance.

• Be consistent. No matter how logical you think your website is, the majority of visitors probably won’t think the same way. To cut down on the confusion, use similar organization from one page to another, similar headings, similar graphics and links, a single navigation bar, and so on. These touches help make visitors feel right at home.

• Know your audience. Every type of site has its own unwritten conventions. You don’t need to follow the same design in an e-commerce store as you do on a promotional page for an experimental electric harmonica band. To help decide what is and isn’t suitable, check out lots of other sites that deal with the same sort of material as yours.

UP TO SPEED: Reaching As Many People As Possible

Not only do you need to understand your audience, you also need to understand that audience’s computer capabilities. Good web designers avoid using frills unless everyone can experience them. Nothing is more disappointing than visiting a site that’s supposed to have a nice animation and seeing a blank box, simply because your computer doesn’t have the right browser plug-in (an add-on program that gives your browser more capabilities). Nor is it any fun finding a website that’s all decked out for wide-screen monitors, but unbearably cramped (or even worse, partly amputated) on the tiny screen of a netbook.

The creators of the most popular websites carefully consider these sorts of issues. For example, think about the number of people whose computers won’t let them buy a book on Amazon.com, make a bid on eBay, or conduct a search on Google. (Are you thinking of a number that’s close to zero?) To make your website as accessible as these top sites, you need to stick to widely accepted web standards, follow the advice in this book, and try your site on different computers.

It’s been widely remarked that the average web designer goes through three stages of maturity: 1) “I’m just learning, so I’ll keep it simple”; 2) “I’m a web guru, and I’ll prove it by piling on the features”; 3) “I’ve been burned by browser compatibility problems, so I’ll keep it simple.”