Web Page Dos and Don'ts

Durham University Computing Society

October 28, 1998

Don'ts
 Over use of images.
People don't want to wait for ages until some pretty picture is downloaded
for display on their machine. Remember the majority of users are paying
for their web access, so the quicker a page downloads the better! Don't
make the user rely on images for navigation, always have alternative text.
Take a look at http://www.empire.co.uk/ for an example of what not to
do. Try turning images o before accessing this page and see if you can
get anywhere!
 Blinking text.
Blinking text distracts the user from anything else on the page. This
is not what you want, so don't abuse blinking. If you're using blinking
text, you're abusing it! Look at http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ for
an example (and indeed lots of examples of everything that's bad).
 Animated images.
Much the same as blinking text. You don't want surfers to be mes-
merised by gratuitous animation, you want them to be reading what
you've got to say! http://www.trowland.demon.co.uk/ is a good (bad!)
example. It also claims to be \best viewed with Internet Explorer".
Why alienate over half of your potential audience like that? Also look
at http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/ jbrooks/index.html.
 \Resize your browser to..."
Don't expect the user to resize their browser to whatever size yours is.
If they want it that size, they'll have it at that size. If they're using a
dierent browser you'll probably get the size wrong anyway... Try reading
{ with a small browser window.
 Unreadable text/background combinations.
You'll make your readers go cross-eyed... You don't want people to have
to struggle to read what you have to say. It's probably best to have a dark
text colour on a plain light background - take a look at http://www.dur.ac.uk/ d50rmj/
for a nice easy read.
 Links pages.
Okay, a few links on a page is reasonable and to be expected. But try to
have some other content - if all you have on your page is a collection of
links, you may as well just keep a bookmarks le. People will be just as
interested in that...

1
 2

 Wae.
Get to the point! You often nd that authors ramble on and on before
they get to the interesting content that you actually visited the page for.
Don't make the user have to scroll down the page to get to the interesting
bit { put it at the top so we can all read it! A particular oender is at
http://members.aol.com/byrdsonlne/byrdsstu/byrds.htm.
 Frames.
Frames don't work on most browsers (text browsers especially). Many
users nd frames an irritation and they are very easy to abuse. If you
must use frames, make sure you provide an alternative for those users
with frames-incapable browsers, make sure your site is still easy to navi-
gate through, and make sure that when they leave your site, there aren't
any frames left lying around! By the way, have you ever noticed how book-
marks don't work properly in framed up pages? I have... For examples of
what not to do, take a look at any of these:
http://www.marconicomms.com/
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/ 93018796/index js.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/
http://mail.bris.ac.uk/ ligrw/home blutack.html
Dos
 Have something to say and say it!
The most important thing to have in a web page is content. If you don't
have anything to say, people aren't going to be especially interested in
your page - too often lack of content is disguised by lots of graphics and
glitz. Remember, nothing is more important in a web page than content.
Closely followed by...
 Navigability
Make sure people can nd your way around your site. If you have a link
between two of your pages, have a link back again. You don't want people
to get lost!
 Keep links up to date.
If you have links to external sites, try to make sure that they're kept up to
date! Broken links tend to appear in swarms... if two or three are broken
on one page, people are going to give up.
 Validate your HTML.
If your HTML is broken then it's possible that some browser will display
it incorrectly, so make sure your HTML is correct. Just because it gets
past Netscape's parser doesn't mean it is correct! There are validation
services available on the web - http://validator.w3c.org/ is one.
Some good examples
http://www.durge.org/
http://www.anchovy.durge.org/
http://www.w3c.org/
http://www.htmlhelp.com/
http://slashdot.org/