Plugging Your Journey into the Web
If you decide to make a web site for your journey, here are some things to consider. If this is the first web site you have ever done, you are probably going to be real frustrated from time to time. Don't get discouraged, it just takes a little (or a lot) of effort. The reward of getting it done is worth it.
- Make Backups!
- I can't stress this enough. Don't tell yourself that you will make a backup after you have it all put together. Make a backup whenever you make a major change. Think of the amount of time you have invested in each revision, and compare it to how much time it takes to back it up to a ZIP drive. Also, make a seperate backup of each version. This is real helpful in case you accidentally trash something and need to recover it from a previous version (personal experience again).
- Remember Your Audience
- Internet surfers have the attention span of gnats on amphetamines. Keep this in mind.
- A Web Site is Different
- A web site should not be just like a printed document. The answer to an interesting web site is probably not to just use the "Export to HTML" option in Pagemaker or "Save as HTML" from Microsoft Word. Make the effort to put together a web site. The good news is that some of the limiting factors you encountered in the printed version will disappear on a web site. Color images don't take much more space than black and white ones. The bad news is that you will be faced with another set of constraints.
Be creative. If you see a technique on a web site that you think is really spiffy, use it. At the same time, remember what you find annoying on web saites and don't do it. In particular, I would avoid using plug-ins. Personally, I generally won't even stop at a site that requires plug-ins. If you decide that you just can't create a site without using plug-ins, make them optional for the site visitor. - Prepare Your Images
- As a general rule, photographs are best used as JPGs, while charts and graphs can generally be saved as GIFs. Keep the dimensions and overall file size in mind. Another rule of thumb is keep any images at or below 50K in size, smaller if possible. If you have Smart Saver from Ulead, this is generally fairly easy to accomplish. As far as size goes, try to keep them limited to around five or six hundred pixels in width and the same in depth.
Learn how to make and use thumbnails on your web pages and have them link to a full-sze version of the image. One common mistake that people make is to force a full-size image into a thumbnail through the use of the height and width tags in the html code. All this does is slow down the process. If you do this, not only does the full-size image have to be downloaded, but the browser has to go through the additional effort of making a large image fit into a small space.
Image size is what makes pages slow or quick to load. Keep the gnats analogy I used above in mind. - Avoid "Bleeding Edge" Technology
- You may have Netscape 4 with all the latest plug-ins, Cascading Style Sheets and so on. The overwhelming majority of visitors to your site will not have. Most people are still using Netscape 3, if they are that far along. Content is what ultimately makes a site interesting. Graphics and bells and whistles will get people to stop, but content is what makes them stay and come back. A pretty good rule of thumb is to try to imagine your parents visiting the site.
Check out your site with a variety of browsers and on different types of computers. You will be surprised at what a difference it can make. Make absolutely sure that you view your site with different screen size settings. A site that looks great at 640 by 480 screen size may not be so hot at 800 by 600. The reverse is also true. - Watch Your Download Times!
- Keeping the gnats in mind, if a page takes longer than a minute to download over a standard modem connection, most people won't wait. This is especially true iof they are first-time visitors. Keep each page on your site a reasonable size. If you catch their attention, they won't mind loading multiple pages. Make the effort.
- Decide Where to Put Your Site
- Most internet accounts come with a moderate amount of disk space for putting up your own personal site. Check with your service provider to find out if this is true. This site takes about three megabytes, if you want to have something to go on. Getting space from your local provider is probably the least painful way to do this.
If your service provider doesn't provide space for a personal site, there are a lot of options available. Geocities, as well as a number of other companies, will tempt you with the siren song of free space. There's no such thing as a free lunch. These sites are incredibly slow at any time of the day or night. In addition, you may have to agree to let them put up banner ads on your site. The hominess of your journey would probably be spoiled by a banner ad for (insert name of product here).
The final option is the most expensive. You can get your own Internet domain name and have a site hosting service provide space that you have complete control over. It depends on how much time you think you will invest in your journey site. You may also decide to put up other, unrelated sites (like I have) at some point in the future. I have my site hosted by Tabnet. The service runs about $30 per month. Their servers are reliable and fast at almost any time of day.
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