Website Design

What's this HTML, then?

Whether you code all your pages yourself in HTML or you use a drag and drop editor, there are certain things you need to make sure of in your code.

The big problem with drag and drop editors is that they add a lot of unnecessary code to your pages, which increases their file weight, and they tend to arrange things in tables. Now tables are great for getting all your elements lined up, but the problem is that most browsers will load table content before anything else - so if your images are within tables, the browser will be hanging around waiting for them to load before it can display any text.

Drag and drop editors may make life a lot easier, but you will always have more control over your code if you do it yourself.

Some of the most important things to remember about your coding concern the accessibility of your pages. Firstly, you should make sure that the code you are using looks the same in Netscape as it does in Internet Explorer, or vice versa. Some very widely-used elements that work perfectly in Internet Explorer will not show on Netscape, for example coloured scrollbars and table borders. And what about other browsers, like Opera? Use the browser reference chart at Webmonkey.com to check what elements are available in which browsers. You should really download at least one other browser to see how your site looks in a selection of screens.

Secondly, what about people who are surfing with their images turned off, or using an audio browser because they are sight-impaired? You need to make sure they are catered for, as well. The best way to ensure this is to include ALT tags within your IMG tags. Think about how your ALT description will sound to someone on an audio browser. Your head banner should not just say "logo" or "banner" but should be the name of your site. If you use little pre-loader images, set the ALT tags as just "" otherwise the audio browser will sit there for ages instead of just ignoring them.

Your images should also include height and width tags. This will enable the browser to display the page properly before the graphics are loaded, rather than bobbing up and down as the graphics come in (which always gives me seasickness). Also, if the graphics are off, the page will still display with all the text in the right places.

Remember that if you use a dark background image on your site, you will need to specify a dark background colour so that someone without images will still be able to read your text.

You can use a Web-based HTML Validator which will check your source code for common errors.

You should also make sure you check all the links on your site, both internally and externally, on a regular basis. You can download a free program called Xenu Link Sleuth that will do this for you.

You can check the load time of your site at NetMechanic.

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