Spicing Up Your Website

You have a website, now what? Is it boring, unorganized, and void of color, or does it make your friends and colleagues choke with distaste? This site will show you how to improve your site by learning how to borrow other people's code from pages that you find attractive. Discover websites that provide free resources that help you manage your site. The hints and tips presented in this webpage will definitely help spice up your website.

HTML Quick Reference (Cheatsheets)

Image Issues and Resources

Copyright on the Web

Improving Traffic: Becoming Friends with META tags (and other ways)

Color and More Color

Accessibility: Allowing People with Dissabilities to Use Your Site

Browser Compatibility (or lack thereof)

Adding Groovy Technology

My personal note: If the technology that you want to add to your website doe not help in navigation, aesthetics, or usability, then I wouldn't add it. The saying goes, just because you can, it doesn't mean you should.

Information Architecture: Creating Blueprints Prior to Building Sites

Usability & Human Factors

Font Information

My personal note: Downloading and using fonts in webpages are great, but only if you use them as images, as you often see in naviagation bars. Just because you have a unique font, it doesn't mean that your user has that same font loaded on his or her computer. Browsers also sometimes read fonts differently.

Want Comments? Use a Form

Stylesheets: My Favorite Invention

My personal note: Stylesheets are great tools if you have a website with several pages. Maintaining that site then becomes much easier. You can use styles within a page, but it sort of defeats the point of taking advantage of having an external, linked CSS. Most browsers now support CSS 1.0, but CSS 2.0 isn't 100% supported by every browser yet, and if you have users that might have MUCH older versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer, the styles won't display at all. There are work arounds for this so your page still displays. But browsers are increasingly more supportive and standards-making bodies encourage the use of CSS. Be aware that some styles are proprietary (some styles are made by Microsoft and will only display in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, for example. And, different browsers on different operating systems will display styles differently, so be sure to test your site in various browsers.

Website Evaluation, Tips and Other Good Stuff

Cleaning Up: Time to Get out the Virtual Broom

My personal note: If you are hard-coding, take pride in your work. And whether or not you are using a text editor or a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor, validate your work. Why? You can read the article above. But from a librarian's perspective, we are getting more and more bombarded with information everyday. Tons of it is on the Web. Also, technology is invading almost every aspect of our lives -- from movies to cell phones to refrigerators that can order groceries. Standardization is the future, and that includes the standardization of code for Internet Browsers. Actually, XHTML is the latest standard for the language of the Web, but because Browsers are independent of Standard Organizations like the W3C, they allow for poorly coded HTML that is not valid. Standardize your code! It will make it more accessible to everyone!

Document Type Definition(DTD)and DOCTYPE Declarations

Sins of Websites (with more examples than you ever could want)

Keep in mind that these are opinions and some people might dispute them, but most of them are agreed upon by web designers.
My personal note: Sometimes bad web pages are more fun to look at than good web pages. And sometimes what is normally considered bad web design can be useful or even done well. For example, most people hate using frames. There are many disadvantages and challenges to using them. But when done well, they can be wonderful tools for improving navigation within a site.

"What You See Is What You Get" Editors

© 2002- Rachel Vacek, Electronic Resources Librarian, Vanderblit University