Improve the Basics

BEFORE YOU START adding all manner of extras to your site, you need to make sure that you have strong foundations. This section deals with the little tweaks that will get your site ready for anything you throw at it. These range from giving your site a quick redesign or improving your HTML knowledge.

1. Have a plan of action
Before you rebuild your site, decide what it's for. Is it personal information, an online diary, or a way of sharing your interests with the masses? A rough general idea will make planning the details that much easier. To see a BusinessPlan check this out.

2. Get a free makeover
Sign up with Geocities or Lycos, to take advantage of their web-based tools to create a new look and feel for your site. (You can always move your pages to another host once you've finished!)

3. Instant Web sites
For a professional-looking site with the minimum of fuss, Visit Web Template, a template site. There's much scope for avant-garde design, and there's even less opportunity to mess up. Another option is hosting including ready made templates from - RazorSite.com - easy, powerful websites in minutes!

4. One day at a time
If your site's an online diary, make it easy to update by signing up with Diaryland or Pitas. You'll get a catchy URL and email address, a set of templates to choose from, and the ability to edit your site without needing to code HTML.

5. Get Bloggered
An account with Blogger allows you to make regular updates to your site through a user-friendly Web interface. With Blogger, you can delegate updates to your friends, and even host your 'Web log' for free - see an example here SøgemaskineOptimering for a site that runs a weblog with BlogSpot.com. If you would like to run you blog on your own domain try RazorPix - BLOG like NEVER BEFORE!

6. Give your site a brain
If you're already competent with HTML, and have a hosting account that runs scripts, take a look at Noah Grey's GreyMatter, a set of tools to simplify and automate site updates: perfect for lazy control freaks!

7. What's in a name?
With free hosting, it's easy to build a site, but it takes your own domain name to make it memorable. Pick one up cheaply at Domains & Hosting the lowest domain name prices online.

8. Upgrade your editor
A decent HTML editor will make your life easier, by providing quick access to tags, colour highlighting, and built-in syntax checking. Editors range from the freeware Arachnophilia to Macromedia's Homesite, the choice of many professionals.

9. Know your tags
It's easy to clutter a site, just because you can't remember the right tag for the job. Print out a quick reference guide, like the one at Webmonkey and keep it by your PC.

10. Accessories for your browser
Download Microsoft's Web Accessories for a set of useful add-ons to IE's right-click menu, including the ability to list all the links on a page, and to calculate page loading times under different connection speed.

11. Life's rich tapestry
For the best combination of power and ease-of-use, Macromedia's Dreamweaver is unbeatable. You get one of the few accurate WYSIWYG interfaces for Web design, together with plenty of tools for scripting and DHTML. Pricey, but well worth trying out.

12. Learn from the experts
Plenty of Web design pros offer online advice, from beginners tutorials to advanced techniques. Have a look through the step-by-step guides at Wired Webmonkey or CNet's Web Builder

13. Use the source, Luke
The best tutorial of all is built into your browser: select 'view source', and you'll see exactly how your favorite sites are put together. Most Web designers learn from adapting other people's work: just remember that plagiarism is just a posh word for 'stealing'.

14. Sketch out your ideas
Decent planning underpins every well-executed site. Begin by creating a mock-up of the design you're after: it doesn't have to be a work of art. A couple of pencil sketches by your side, marked with relevant pixel widths, can make all the difference when it comes to writing the code.

15. Put it on the table
Arrange the different sections of each page into invisible HTML tables (ie with BORDER="0"). This has two advantages. It ensures that related elements have a consistent appearance, and it also makes it easier to work on your pages one section at a time. For an example of visible tables go to AntiVirus

16. But not too many tables
Pages built with tables inside tables inside tables take ages to download, as the browser has to work hard to put everything in the right place. Again. careful planning will work wonders here.

17. Single-pixel perfection
Create a single pixel GIF file in a transparent color (or download one from Search Engine Expert ) and use it, resized with HEIGHT and WIDTH tags, to give precise control over the spacing in your pages. It might seem as there is nothing on the site but it is located in the top of the browser to the left.

18. Don't be a style victim
It's a good idea to use cascading style sheets to define font sizes and colours across your site, to give it a consistent look and feel without messing about with FONT tags on every page. Read more about Cascading Style Sheets here.

19. Create Templates
Instead of assembling each new page from scratch, put together a basic template containing the common HTML elements of each page, then make the file read-only. You save time, and ensure that pages have a professional look.

20. Watch your waistline
It's tempting to cram things onto your front page, but bigger pages mean longer downloads. Try to keep the size of pages (including images) down to around 50K: every kilobyte you trim from a page will save a precious secound. Even many have DSL linies still all lot are using dial-up connection so don't go crazy with graphics and Flash.

21. Leave a comment
Use  to describe the different elements of your pages. It may seem like a drag at first, but it makes a real difference when you come back to a page in a year's time and can't remember what everything does. WARNING - when using comment tags be careful not to use keywords this is something Search Engines like Google & AltaVista is looking for and they might consider this to be spam and you might end up with your site getting banned from the search engines.

22. Capital investments
HTML source code is probably the only place online where it makes sense to TALK IN CAPITALS. Putting your tags in upper case will help you distinguish them from the actual content of your site.

IMPROVE ON THE BASICS