G D Williams asked:

There are various free work at home jobs that are available to you through the internet. Data entry jobs, survey jobs, customer service, creative design, human resources and there are many more job opportunities available to you when you search the internet, these jobs allow you work at home at your convenience and earn a income that will help pay those ever increasing bills.

Free work at home jobs will cost you no money, or initial fee to start work. All you will require is a modern computer with internet connection and a phone. You can apply online and enjoy the fun of working at home and even better your new job will fit in around your lifestyle or shedule, also you can earn great pay at the same time. These jobs are ideal for stay at home mothers, disabled people, and senior citizens and for those who need to take care of elderly or sick people at home.

Free work at home jobs allow you spend as much time as you wish earning your new income. You can also select part time or full time jobs according to your shedule. Since there are various job opportunities available, you can decide which job suits you according to your ability and qualifications. You can apply for a job and get training and scheduling for this job, all by just going online. Therefore there is no need to step out of your home to get a job. The free work at home jobs database provides you a list of potential jobs which are totally scam free.

Here are some free work at home job descriptions that you will find useful.

Online tutoring is with out doubt one of the best work at home jobs available, that does not require any initial amount to be spent by you. If you are already qualified or have experience in advanced math’s or science or in some language, then you can apply for this sort of work. You will be able to start work working at a shedule that is convenient to you and enjoy great pay. If you are willing to spend more time with this type of work, then you can earn more money.

Clerical and data entry work at home jobs require some previous experience and computer skills. Organization and communication skills may also be required to gain this job. These types of jobs may also require initial face to face training. These jobs provide options like part time and full time. You can also select which is most convenient to you day shift or night shift work.

Transcription work from home includes many types like legal transcription, medical transcription and so forth. Experience and accurate knowledge about this type work will be required. However this job can help you earn a regular income.

Translation work at home jobs requires a good knowledge in some language and you may need to translate emails and documents from one language to another. If you have a good command over any language, then you can apply for these type of job. Previous experience may not be required for this type of work.

Graphic design work at home jobs will require some experience in this field and you may be required to do layout work, icon design and so on. Previous experience may be either optional or compulsory. You can decide wether to work part time or full time option in this job.

Management work at home jobs allow you earn a larger income. However, this job will require some qualifications and prior experience. You may also be required to work for certain hours or to a shedule daily.

There are many more free work at home job opportunities available to you. You also can choose if so desired by you to take on more than one job at a time. This type of job lets you work independently and conveniently and at the same time provides you decent income.

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Boris Tomson asked:

The Secret To Finding Real Work At Home Jobs

If you have ever considered working from home, you may have hesitated to get involved due to all the work from home scams. But there are real work at home job available and many people have made the leap successfully. When you work from home, it affords you the opportunity to balance your career and your family life because you are often in control of when and how much you work.

The working from home concept is one that appeals to many people and if you want to choose this kind of career, there are a lot of opportunities for you. It is even possible to start a home based business, if you like. If you have a passion for some line of work, such as writing, graphic design or handicrafts, you can carve out the business you like most. It will give you immense satisfaction to work on something you enjoy and at the same time derive some profit out of it. Plus, there’s the flexibility to schedule your own work hours.

You may want to consider taking a position with a larger company if you have concerns about the cost involved in starting a business, or you just do not feel ready to start a business of your own. Legitimate, real work at home positions can be found, but you must know how to find them. Perhaps you have had enough of that long commute to a job that does not really mesh with the demands of your home life. If so, you may want to look into a job that allows you to work from home with the flexibility to arrange your hours to suit your needs.

Dont put up good money for listings of work at home positions. Those offers are often just scams. Real work at home jobs exist for nearly everybody, if you take some time to do your research on the internet and find out about available openings and contacting different companies.

For most valid work at home jobs, you will need a computer, internet access, and perhaps a landline telephone. This equipment is necessary for telecommuting, which is what your communication with your employer is called. You get to stay home, and the distance is bridged using the telephone or internet.http://online-typingwork.blogspot.com

Besides writing skills and a good work ethic, strong computer skills will be required for work at home jobs such as transcription work or inputting data . Other types of real work at home jobs are telemarketing, customer service and phone acting but these almost always require strong telephone skills as well as a dedicated telephone line. Most companies require that you have a land line and not a cell phone for this type of work.

With a real work at home job, stay at home parents can make extra money while remaining at home with the kids. As increasing numbers of people decide to work from home, many businesses are taking note of this and even more opportunities may arise in the future.

As the work at home trend continues, many more opportunities may come up, so start looking into the options available to work from home right now.

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2 young 2 understand asked:


I obviously can’t have a job that would require me to deal with coworkers bc one of them is bound to piss me off. I end up going off on them and I get canned. However, if I work at home and I explode, it would be at home and not at a company. The problem is what work at home jobs are out there and how can I get them? I’m not considering self employment. I wanna be tied to a company. Plus, how hard is it to get hired at the company if I were fired for workplace violence against an inanimate object?
Oh and I almost 4got 2 mention. I was also fired for verbally abusing a coworker. Would the prospective employer care since I’ll be at home and not at their place of business?

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taco asked:


I’m trying to find some legitamite work at home jobs to makeat least $100.oo a week or more

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britney_gurl23 asked:


are there any legit data entry work at home jobs available and that don’t have a start up fee either and that actually pay out.
thanks

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obaidahmed asked:

Please suggest any stay at home jobs (online jobs) or means for people who want to earn money through such jobs working as part time employees.

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davepilbeam asked:

Who do i contact? How do i collect the money? How do’s it work?

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john T asked:

I want to be able to make a little money from doing online surveys. I do not want surveys that just mostly have giveaways as the rewards of doing a survey. Also it would be great if a website would accept people under 18 and use paypal. Thankyou

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raily214 asked:

I want to earn money online without credit cards and paying something. I want companies to just send me the money via money transfer or something.

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When many people look for ways to make money they are looking for something that is easy to get started with. With that in mind starting an Internet marketing business does make a lot of sense. Here is a way you can create your own make money home business and do it very simply.

There are programs on the Internet today that will set you up with your own website and make it easy for you to sell their product. This is a huge benefit to a new person trying to get started online because building a website is a hard thing to do.

Another thing that most successful home business opportunities do is provide excellent training. Today many offer weekly conference calls that you can set in on and learn how to make Money on the Internet.

Some offer video training in the form of webinars you can access and learn how to get started promoting your business online. And of course they all offer various tutorials and e-books that you can read and learn as well.

One program that he is kind of interesting is known as the Plug-in Profit Site. With this program you are given your own moneymaking website as well as an email newsletter to build a mailing list.

This concept is good because these are two of the necessary items that do help you make money with your own home business. As a matter of fact you cannot say enough about the importance of building a mailing list.

If you are going to spend the time to learn how to drive traffic to your website you should also learn how to collect names and email addresses as well. By having a mailing list to follow up with you are building an asset for your future success.

Most customers do not make a purchase on their first visit and on the Internet it is very difficult to get them to come back to your website. When you have their name and email address you are able to contact them and remind them about products and programs that your business offers.

I certainly feel that the kind of make money home business a person should want would be one that provides quality products, a website, and a way to build a mailing list for future follow. If you find one that offers all three then it’s probably an excellent way for you to get started making money at home.

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There are many people who have turned to the web to make money. Home based business is big, and there are definitely many excellent benefits to working at home. If you are interested in getting involved in working at home with your own business, then you’ll find that many options are available, which can be a bit overwhelming. So, if you are looking for some great ideas for making money from home, here are some of the best ones you’ll want to consider.

Designing Websites

Do you enjoy designing websites? If so, then this is an excellent home based business to get involved in. Many people today are looking for help with website design, and this is a great business that you can easily run from your home. Sure, it’s going to cost you a bit for the right software as well as good hardware, but you can really make some good money designing websites.

Online Business Coaching

Another great option that you have if you want to make money home based business is online business coaching. If you have experience with a business skill or you have management experience, you can use those skills to start up your own home based business. Today many people go to the internet to find a good coach for their business needs and you can take advantage of this.

Freelance Writing

Freelance writing is another excellent idea to explore if you want to start your own business that you can run out of your home. After all, there are many people on the web looking for great writing. New websites need good content, and many website designers don’t specialize in writing the content. So, there is a huge market for freelance writers on the web. Not only can you write web content, but online magazines hire, and even many companies hire out their copywriting to freelance writers over the web.

Software Support

Look around the internet. You’ll find that there are many different types of free software out there. However, since they are free, usually there is no support offered for them. Since many people like to find some support when they have questions or problem, you can start up your own software support for some of these programs and charge for your services. This is an excellent way to start up your own business if you are very knowledgeable about any public domain software.

Data Entry

Although most data entry workers used to work on site, today there are more and more employers that are hiring out their data entry work to people on the web. The market on the web is very competitive and companies don’t have to pay for insurance and benefits for workers on the web, which has made online data entry extremely popular. It allows people who want to work at home to have a great business opportunity to make some excellent money, since data entry jobs on the web pay quite well. So, this is yet another great option that you can explore when you are looking for an online business you can run from your own home.

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Working from home. It’s the dream of many people today and the internet really makes it more possible than ever before. With modern day technology there are so many different ways that you can make money from home. If you are wondering how to make money home, you’ll find that there are many great opportunities out there. In fact, there are many great work at home options that offer you the potential to earn a good living, all while working in your own home. Looking for some great ideas? Here are some top work at home options that you may want to look into that will allow you to successfully make money from home.

Become a Customer Service Representative

One great option that is available that may be the answer to your searching for a great home job opportunity is becoming a customer service representative from your own home. With a telephone and a computer with internet, it’s totally possible to get involved in a job like this. In fact, you’ll find that there are many companies today that are outsourcing their customer service jobs. There are already many people working at home in customer service and it allows them to easily set their own hours around a busy schedule. Usually you can not only make a nice hourly wage, but there are bonuses and incentives that can help. Some companies even will offer retirement plans and benefits, although others do not.

Affiliate Marketing

Another excellent job opportunity that you can consider if you are wondering how to make money home, is affiliate marketing. No doubt you have heard of it. It’s become one of the most popular ways to make money online today. Basically this type of work at home opportunity allows you to promote the products of companies for them. When people purchase the products, you get a percentage of the purchase price for commission. Many people like this job because they don’t have to come up with their own products. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that affiliate marketing is going to be an easy job. In fact, it takes quite a bit of learning and work if you’re going to be successful.

Blogging Jobs

Blogging jobs also offer you the ability to work at home. Blogging has become increasingly popular in the past couple years. You can either start up your own blog and work to make it lucrative or you can look for blogging jobs where you write blogs for someone else. If you are experienced in blogging already, many times you can find great blogging jobs at home that pay from $10 to $100 a post, which can really help you bring in a great income. However, if you are going to use your own blog to make money, be aware that building it up, bringing in traffic, and making it lucrative can all take some time.

Freelancing Professionally

Last of all, freelancing professionally also is an excellent way to make money from your own home. Whether you write, you’re a photographer, you are involved in data entry, or you are great at writing software, there are people out there that are looking for freelancers in a variety of different professions and it allows you to take your professional experience and use it to make money while you are working at home. You can easily find freelance sites that post job opportunities for freelancers where you can bid for jobs that you are interested in.

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If one is forming a group of web site or a business web site, the main thing is that his/her agenda must to find good, dependable, cheap webhosting for his/her site. In nearly all cases, a free hosting service never works. One will quickly find out that there’s a broad range of prices that are nearly affordable, and what are the services that comes with the web-hosting package.

Things to be considered while selecting a web-hosting package

Before taking any decisions, one should know very clearly that what he/she needs. One should also know the purpose of his/her web site and what are the things he/she requires from the server. For example, if one is planning to host a web-based community forum, he/she certainly needs a web host, which gives PHP and an SQL database. On the other hand, if one is planning for running the Active Server Pages, or .NET applications, he/she should need a server running on Windows rather than a UNIX or Linux code base.

Realize the need before searching, which is far easier to select rather than changing afterwards.

One should look for the best plans.

Accompaniments can change a cheap web-hosting package into an expensive one before one knows it completely. Mainly hosting packages permit one to add on a la carte items as one requires them, but it may get expensive afterwards. If the web host one has chosen, charges a setup fee for the shopping cart, which one didn’t think he/shed need, it could easily be the same as of several months hosting fees. Thus ,one should decide what he/she will need, then should get more than what one expects he/she’ll use.

Cheapest web host, providing 24/7 support.

Ideally, ones web hosting provider must admit any request for assisting his/her client within an hour with a predictable time of completion. Ones host server should provide his/her client with a searchable known factor to guide him/her through most familiar tasks, which one needs to-do, and support desk to help one online at any time.

Despite how cheap a web host cost is, if it’s not working, then one is surely wasting his/her money for no use. However, before signing up with a web-hosting provider, one should supervise them for a while, or must ask around on forums about their previous records. A hosting service MUST be reliable. A hosting service which is not able to keep ones site online and available may only lose his/her business and money. So be cautious!!

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Built a local newsgroup to help communicate among people who move into the city as expatriates and have 1000 members now. I am planning to upgrade to a blog or a web site where I can organize events, help members interact, provide helpful information and of course make money from ads. Any suggestions?

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As a web site owner it is important to recognize your target market and make it as simple as possible for your potential customers to find your products or services. Internet users can be impatient, and with no shortage of competition, visitors can quickly lose interest in your web site and move on to the next one in the search results. Now, if you have this particular problem then at least you have traffic going to your web site and it’s simply a matter of how to keep your visitors interested. This article will touch on some of the common mistakes I see on web sites.

I see a lot of different web sites from all sorts of industries everyday and there are a few basic mistakes I see quite frequently that are easily fixed. This isn’t about the design or the SEO, but the simple and most basic details that are often overlooked. For example, let’s say I’m a DJ and have my own DJ company called “John’s DJ Services”. My web site has been designed to showcase my offered services, display images from past events, and even some testimonials from previous clients. I have contact information including my company email address and a phone number. Sound like a pretty good web site concept? Not bad, but what’s missing? Where is this DJ company located? What area of the city, country, or world are these great services being offered? It’s unbelievable how hard it can be at times to determine where geographically a company is offering it’s service based on its web site. I often find myself using Google to search the area code in their phone number just to find out what part of the world the company is in! The only reason I even bother is because I am evaluating their web site for them by request. If I was a potential customer there is no way I would waste my time and I would be off to the next site. I see this on a daily basis and I guarantee it is costing these companies money.

The point here isn’t to make fun of web sites or their lack of such details. What I really want to say is that sometimes there are some very simple ways to improve your web site without spending a dollar on SEO or expensive redesigns. Web site designers often overlook these details as well because they are focussed more on the visual look of a site, and generally only use the content provided by their customer. SEO companies often take a web site designed by someone else and clean up the code, and embark on elaborate link development campaigns also sometimes overlooking the most simple details. However as a business owner it is important for you to think about your web site from your customer’s perspective and not from your designer or SEO companies. You know your customer’s needs and wants. Designers and SEO companies know how to showcase your products and services, but they are not experts in your field.

When looking at either designing a new web site, updating a current web site, or increasing your traffic to either, first take a step back and ask yourself, “if a customer was looking for my product or service and found my web site, would he or she find it useful?” If a customer in St. Louis is looking for a “health spa” to visit and can’t find yours, perhaps you should make sure that your web site clearly states: “St Louis Health Spa - Relax at Sarah’s Health Spa”. Display this somewhere easy to see like in your title tag and in your heading tags. Don’t make the user search for this information, this is just as important as the actual service you’re offering. Think of the internet as a big shopping mall except all the shoppers are lost and have no idea what city they’re in. They have an idea of what they want, but they have no idea where to find it. Make it easy for them to get the information they seek.

Another common mistake I see regularly on web sites is the “intro page”. First of all, what is it trying to accomplish by being there? It’s telling me what I already know: I’m at this web site. Let’s visit this problem from a potential customer’s perspective and I’m the customer. I’m using Google to search for a “seafood restaurant in San Francisco”. I get the first page results and see that the first is from google maps, and the next two are directories, before seeing the fourth result is an actual restaurant’s web site. So I will start with that one. I click the link to the site and after waiting 15-20 seconds for the page to load, I’m shown a visually stunning “intro page”. At this point I have already spent more time than I wanted to with this web site, and I’m thinking about hitting the back button and moving on to the next result. What if I’m trying to load your web site in my hotel room and have week wireless internet signal? Now instead of taking 15-20 seconds to load, it could be up to a minute! I guarantee now that I won’t be dining at your establishment. The point here isn’t that all visitors are going to be annoyed by your intro page and leave, but many will. Why would you want any potential customers to leave your web site before even having a chance to turn them in actual customers?

The solution here again is simple. Do away with the senseless intro page. In fact do away with anything on your home page as well that will slow down the loading of your web site. Small images are great for most people’s internet connections and browsers, but text is obviously the best. It’s quick and to the point, which is how you want your visitors to find your web site.

Think like your customers, walk in their shoes and you will have more success at meeting their needs.

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What is web publishing?

What are the goals of your site?

Is the goal to entertain, to provide information or graphics, or to provide some unique service? Or, perhaps, it’s something other than this!

If it’s for a business, are you trying to grab the attention of new customers, give information about products and services, do market research, or provide customer support? Do you also intend to highlight your after sales service?

How does the design and implementation of your web site support your goals?

For commercial sites

If your site is a commercial site, most of the surfers will go to your site with an intention to get information. They won’t be there for “a total web experience,” or to be entertained, or for the thrill of visiting a “Fabulous web site.”

They’ll want to know things like:

“What options are available and what do they cost?”

“What are the features of your products and services?”

“How can I contact your company?”

“Where and how can I buy your products?”

“Do you have a range of products or services?”

A commercial web site is a significant link of your company and, in some cases; it will be the prime option in which your customers and others interact with you in the future.

During the infant stage of the web many companies wanted to “just have a web presence” so they turned to graphics, advertising agencies, and the new generation of web design firms. Although these firms had a good background in graphic arts, most of them were quite novice in the ball game of creating web sites. They over-emphasized the graphics aspect and tried to entertain in the same way as print ads or TV commercials.

However, an effective web site needs a lot more than this. It should start with a requirements definition that evaluates the real needs of the company and how they can best be served through the web. This should be followed by a careful design and planning stage. The next phase is to build and test the site.

But the pitfall here is that a web site needs continuous updating and maintenance to sustain and stay in tune with the times. A lot of sites are designed in a way that failed to adhere to these aspects. You also have to consider the operations aspects of the site, such as guaranteeing response time and availability.

If you plan to build a web site that really makes sense, you should consider engaging the services of a systems architect before you contact the graphics companies or hire those Java programmers. An architect will plan your site as a system designed to meet your corporate goals, rather than just a bunch of interconnected HTML pages.

Make your site easy to navigate

Give serious thoughts to the roadmap of your site and how its different elements are linked. How is this navigational information conveyed to the user?

Could someone, after visiting your site, draw a simple diagram showing how the different elements are connected and how you get from one place to another?

If someone comes to your site looking for a specific piece of information, how easy is it to locate it?

How does a visitor figure out all of the things they can see or do at your site?

How does a visitor figure out how to navigate your particular site?

How can the visitor tell if they have seen everything?

How can a visitor tell what they have and have not seen?

Make it easy for a visitor to determine what is new and when things were changed.

A site that is difficult to navigate will also be difficult to maintain.

Complexity will limit the size of your site.

Complexity will make it difficult to test your site.

Some tips to generate repeat visitors to your site:

Make it large enough to require more than one visit to view the entire site. But make it easy to remember what the visitor has already seen by avoiding complex design.

Change your site often. But make it easy for the visitor to figure out what was changed, and when.

Make your site a source of reference material - a list, an index, a database. Perhaps allowing the user to search it for a particular topic or item.

Make your site an authentic and reliable source on a particular subject.

In the world of the web, every visitor is different

Remember that there are great variations in the computer platform, display setup, processor and disk speed, connection speed, and the particular browser software being used by each individual visitor to your web site. And the visitors themselves will be different, in every conceivable way.

Don’t assume that every visitor to your site has the latest hardware and software, a super-speed connection to the Internet, and the eyesight and reflexes of an energetic young teenager!

There will be a great variation in how your site looks to different users if you rely on fancy HTML gimmicks.

There will be a great variation in how your site looks to different users even if you don’t use fancy HTML gimmicks!

You have to decide whether the goal of your site is to impress those special few with your technical razzle-dazzle, or to make it a site for the enjoyment of masses.

Don’t create a site that caters to the select few of the total visitors you are targeting.

As a result of heavy Internet traffic, web pages bloated with gratuitous graphics, older hardware or software, a fair number of folks are surfing the web with the graphics turned off in their browsers. What does your site look like without its graphics?

You are going to lose a lot of points if you mention Netscape (or Microsoft), in any way, on the first page that your visitors see. This includes describing your site as “Netscape-enhanced,” telling your visitors that your site is only presentable if they have the latest version of Netscape, or pointing to a site where they can download the latest version of Netscape. Think of the message that it sends about you and your site. Think also of the first impression your web site leaves among the first time visitors.

How does your site look with Lynx? Try it and you’ll see how your site looks with a text-only viewer. This may be the only viewer that a Unix user will have, especially in foreign countries. If your site is mainly informational, don’t deny access to these potential visitors.

And you had better prepare yourself for the invasion of the surfers who will reach your site through add-ons to their TV set, cable box, or plug-in for their game playing machine. These new widgets will have limited capabilities, very much like the earlier versions of the more popular browsers.

The major online services have well over 10 million paying customers. Very soon, most of them will have web browsers, but they won’t be the very, very latest version of Netscape. Your pages may look very strange to them.

The people with money to spend do not have time to fool with getting a SLIP or PPP connection running. And they don’t have time to get and tune the latest version of Netscape (when they hear the word “upgrade,” they most likely think of moving to the First Class section).

They will most likely be using browsers that are integrated into a full-featured online service that provides a single package with news, stock portfolio tracking, and a seamless interface to the Internet and the web.

The real point is that if you have a commercial web site, you can keep Netscape around for testing, but make sure it also works with whatever browser is provided by AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy.

The user interface

When the Macintosh first came out, Apple published a set of user interface guidelines for software developers. Some developers felt that having to adhere to a standardized interface would hamper their creativity. But others realized that it would actually free them to spend more time applying their creativity to step up to the next level of application design.

Consider the signal-to-noise ratio of your interface. How much is useful and interesting, and how much is just noise? Avoid using large or unnecessary graphics that don’t add to the content of the page.

Remember that browsers have a lot of user-configurable features — colors, fonts, etc. These can really mess up your fancy interface.

Don’t make the user confuse where to click.

Don’t replace bullets and horizontal rules with images. It eats bandwidth and confuses the user. If you use images as bullets, your visitors may try clicking on them and wonder why nothing happens.

Be very careful in using graphic elements as controls (buttons, links, etc). The user has to guess what to do.

Try not to have two or more places to click that perform the same action.

Don’t use the “underline” attribute for text. It makes it look like a clickable link.

Find out what your visitors do most often at your site and make that the easiest thing to do. If you’re into intricate jewelry or gemstones embedded jewelry and most of your visitors are there to have a closer and sharper look at your samples, have a big button that says “Get a closer look.” This is a good rule to follow when determining the size and placement of interface elements.

For some reason, most browsers switch to a grey background by default. The easiest way to fix this is to override the browser’s default. Use a white background.

Don’t forget that links show up in different colors than regular text, and may change color after a link is viewed. Consider how these links will show up against a colored background. (And remember that these colors will be different on different browsers and can also be changed by the user.)

You can use a shade of gray as a background if you are not displaying text against it. A lighter shade is advisable.

Keep the interface uniform. Have the same controls perform the same action everywhere.

Avoid putting too many interface elements on the same page. Some sites present the visitor with a bewildering array of image maps, buttons, text links, and images to click on. Don’t use colored, textured, or graphic backgrounds unless absolutely necessary. They may look fine in your browser, but could end up looking quite different in someone else’s browser, or on a computer with different video hardware, color depth, etc. They’re distracting, and they really do make text illegible at times.

Another problem with backgrounds is that they are handled differently by different browsers. On some, your page is first displayed, and then, after some delay, the background suddenly shows up, like a layer of smog descending on the page. With other browsers, you sit and watch a blank page until the background has been downloaded.

Displaying images against anything but a plain background may cause them to be rendered incorrectly by the browser. And it may make it difficult for a visitor to view them. You must have noticed that in Art galleries the paintings are placed with a light background so that the picture comes out well in the eyes of the viewers. Don’t blink anything unless it’s to indicate an emergency such as a life hazard. It’s distracting, and it is quite irritating for the surfer. Try to read something over here while something over there is blinking. It disturbs the attention of the viewer.

Don’t use tricky (or undocumented) HTML to do dissolves or fades or other special effects. They look different on every machine. And after a while, they can get downright annoying. And they may stop working (or work strangely) on different browsers or on new releases of your current browser.

Don’t have something that, when clicked on, takes the visitor back to the page they’re already on. Disorienting. This is common on sites where every page has links to every page.

One way to get a precise block of type, such as a name and address, to appear correctly in every browser is to render the type in an art program, then save it as an image (GIF) file. If done properly, a name-and-address block, including email and web addresses, should be about 2K bytes. (But don’t forget to include a text alternate.)

You can set large (headline) type, normally black, to a shade of gray. But not too light.

Don’t change any of the type colors — either for displayed text or for links. It only disorients the user.

In general, try and keep the user interface simple and uncluttered. Try and use default values whenever possible.

The little red light

Every web browser has one.

It’s a little indicator that turns red when the browser starts to load a page. After all the items on the page have been downloaded successfully, the little red light turns off.

This is especially useful when the web is slow, or when the page is complex. It lets you know when you actually have everything. A very useful element of the browser’s interface.

Unfortunately, there are a number of widgets (like animated images) that you can add to your page that keep the red light from working properly. The one most often encountered is the animated GIF.

With one of these widgets on your page the little red light never goes out. And, as a result, it looks like your page is still loading, even though it may actually have finished. Now the visitor has lost the use of part of the browser’s interface, and has to guess whether the page is complete. Or perhaps wait for the rest of it. Or perhaps give up and move on.

Hint: If the little red light doesn’t go out after your page has loaded, it’s a sign that there’s something on your page that will annoy people.

Use color wisely

Use color to convey information or to draw attention to where it’s really needed.

The standard web interface uses this principle by displaying the hypertext links to other pages in colors that stand out from the rest of the text. In addition, different colors are used to show which links have been visited and which haven’t.

So strong are these clues, that you can look at a web page and tell a lot about it without reading the text.

It’s also a good reason for leaving the text and links in their default colors. Your visitors will have seen hundreds of pages with the text and links in their default colors and will take advantage of this conditioning by being able to navigate a new site without having to constantly relearn the interface.

It’s obvious that if you change the color of the links on your site, or use an image map, much of the possible information will be lost to the visitor and your site will be more difficult to navigate.

Remember, also, that some of your visitors are color blind. At its worst, colors are varying shades of grey. Colored text against a colored background could show up as a grey smudge. Take this into account when you design your pages.

Other visitors, with less-than-perfect vision, may have trouble viewing images and text with strongly contrasting colors (like red text on a blue background). Don’t make your page so that it can only be viewed by teenagers.

Image maps

Avoid putting image maps on your pages unless you have a really good reason for using them. Fancy image maps can be far more confusing than a well-formatted text list or a simple set of buttons.

In many cases, it’s hard to tell just where to click. This is especially true if the map contains both images and words. And since the words are not underlined, it’s hard to tell if they’re links.

Image maps take up a lot of bandwidth and, in most cases, add nothing to your page.

If you use a large image map, your visitors may have to wait for well over a minute before they can begin to navigate your site.

Unlike regular text links, which change color after being clicked on, image maps give no clue about what’s been seen and what hasn’t. This makes it more difficult for the user to navigate your site.

Image maps limit you to a very simple site. It’s difficult to include more than a few items in the map, especially if you are including both icons and text in the map.

The time and effort it takes to modify both the image and the map make the use of image maps a real maintenance headache. It will take far longer to update or change your site if it means modifying the image maps as well. This is especially true if you have used image maps on many of your pages.

If you use an image map, make sure that you include a text list with identical items for those who are confused by your map or are using a browser where images are not being loaded. Locate this alternative list as close to the image map as possible to avoid confusion. Make sure that the list contains all the items on the map, and that they are in the same order.

If your image map is a figure that depicts something real, like a map of the India, USA or Germany, don’t presuppose that your visitors will be able to identify things (Which one is Hamburg or Scotland?) solely by their shape or location.

Also, make sure that your image map gives some sort of a warning if the visitor clicks in an area that doesn’t relate to anything or isn’t defined in the map’s table. (What happens if the visitor clicks in the ocean, next to India?)

Your page’s title

Don’t forget to put a title on every one of your web pages. The title is what shows up at the top of the browser’s window when a page is displayed. If your page doesn’t have a title, the browser will display “Untitled,” or “No Title, or simply the URL of the page, or perhaps nothing.

The title is important. If someone bookmarks your page, the title is what shows up in their list of bookmarks. Or, if someone puts a link to your site on their page, they’ll probably use your page title as the link text. Or, if the page is indexed by a search engine, the title is what shows up in the search results. You get the picture.

Even if you do have titles on your pages you still might want to reevaluate the actual wording. Make sure that the title actually says something. Instead of “My Web Page,” how about: “Bud Spencer — My Web page?” Imagine viewing the two of them in a bookmark list.

If you have a business site, you may want to go even further. For instance, you may want to put the name of your business (or an abbreviation) in the title of every page on your site. You never know which of your pages will be bookmarked, and it will be far easier to pick you out in a list of bookmarks, or any other list that uses the page’s title.

And don’t forget to tell people about yourself and your activities on the main page of your site. Don’t make them guess. For example: “Splendid tours & travels is a travel house delivering domestic as well as international package tours to Europe and Far East.

The width of the browser’s window

Imagine you’re an art director and you have to design an advertisement for a number of media vehicles like newspapers, magazines, tabloids etc. Now all these different media require different column sizes for your advertisement. Sounds crazy? How would you design such an ad?

Yet this is one of the biggest problems facing web page designers. The height of the browser’s window has very little effect on how your page is displayed — you just see more or less of it, sort of like a window shade. But as the width of the browser window changes, it can have a spectacular effect on how your page is displayed.

This is because the browser will try to rearrange the web page to make maximum use of the available browser width.

Two factors determine the width of the browser’s window — the width of the visitor’s screen, which determines the maximum width for the browser, and the proportion of the screen that the browser has been set to.

The practical width of computer screens varies from about 640 to 1280 pixels. This is determined by hardware, software, and the display settings the user has chosen. Your web page should work properly with the browser window set >anywhere< within this range.

There are a number of different elements on your page, but they fall into two groups: those items that can be adjusted in width, and those that can’t.

Items that can be adjusted in width are text (which can wrap) and tables and cells (if declared as a percentage of the window’s width).

Items whose width is fixed are images, text given a “NOWRAP” attribute, text within PRE tags, and tables or cells declared as fixed (pixel) width.

Say you design your page for the middle of the browser range — about 800 pixels wide. What happens when your page is viewed at other browser widths?

Let’s start with a narrower window. If the page is designed with the right mix of fixed and variable elements, the page should still work. You might want to use a table with multiple columns where the leftmost is fixed width and the others variable width. If fixed-width elements are used, the page may end up wider than the browser and a horizontal scrollbar will appear at the bottom of the window. Now the visitor will have to scroll left and right to see your page.

If the window is wider than you designed for, a number of things can happen. If you’ve used an image as a background for your page, and it just fits your medium-sized window, it will repeat as the browser adds another copy to the right in order to fill out the increased width. Tables declared as variable width may be rendered strangely, with elements showing up in unexpected places.

In addition, the way a particular browser juggles your page to fit its width will vary greatly with different browsers. And also with different versions of the same browser.

Obviously, a certain amount of testing and experimentation will be necessary to make sure that your pages display properly at all browser width settings.

A Tip

Keep your home/main page small so that it loads quickly say 10 seconds would be the ideal time. (Especially important when the web slows down.) This will hook the visitor. Think twice about putting that 90K GIF on your home page. Remember that yours is only one of millions of sites — web surfers have short attention spans.

Images

Don’t present high quality images such as art or photographs against a background that is textured or darker colored. Stick to white, a light shade of grey or, if you must use a colored background, use the lighter shades.

Don’t use an image compression technique that isn’t supported by all browsers. At the present time, GIF and JPEG formats are universally recognized.

A JPEG image may compress to a smaller file than a GIF, taking less time to download, but it may take longer to decompress and display, thus making your effort for naught. This is especially true on older, slower machines.

JPEG compression also imposes a loss of image quality, which may (depending on the settings in your image-conversion program, and your visitor’s hardware) be quite noticeable. But JPEG compression will probably give the best results with photographs or other images with lots of colors or fine detail.

With drawings or line art work, the GIF can actually end up smaller than the JPEG. With line art, a GIF may appear sharper than a JPEG since there is no loss of quality in GIF format. However, GIF images can only show a limited range of colors, and may not be suitable for images such as color photographs.

The best option is to try both compression techniques for each of your images and see which gives the smallest file size, the best image quality, and the best performance in downloading and viewing.

And don’t forget to design your pages so that they still are usable if a visitor has the image loading turned off. Use the “Alt” attribute to provide text alternatives for your images.

Interlaced GIFs

Don’t use interlaced GIFs. These give the effect of the image being continuously redrawn at a higher and higher resolution. The files for these images are actually larger than for the equivalent GIF, and take more time to load.

The effect is annoying and it’s hard to tell when the picture is actually ready to be viewed. It’s especially annoying when used to render fine artwork. It’s also annoying when the web is slow and the image sits half-rendered for a period of time. You may also find that the intermediate image resembles something very different from the actual image. It’s just another special effect that will soon be boring.

Animated Images

Avoid using animated images on your page. They make the page load slower — they use big files, slowing down the loading and viewing of the rest of the page. Your page might just sit there for a considerable time, totally blank, while the first animated image loads.

Because they have much larger file sizes than regular images, animated images eat away a lot more of the Internet’s precious bandwidth. It adds in slowing down the web. Animated images cause the page to load improperly — the little red light on the browser doesn’t go out, so there’s no way to tell if the page has finished loading. If the visitor clicks the ‘Stop’ button, it may turn out that the page hasn’t fully loaded, so it has to be loaded again. They can also keep you from being able to scroll the page while it’s loading.

They’re distracting and annoying, making it harder for the visitor to concentrate on the other things on your page. (It is quite disturbing reading something over here while an animated mailbox is flipping opens and closes over there.)

And although it may look cute the first time you see one, after you’ve seen it repeatedly again and again, you feel like smashing the screen sometimes!

And if you switch to another application, the browser now sits in the background, chewing up processor cycles doing animation.

The animation runs at different speeds, depending on the visitor’s hardware, and what else it’s doing at the same time — crawling on slower machines, and flickering between images on fast machines.

And lastly, a number of folks have reported browser crashes on leaving a page that had an animated image. When the browser crashes, it can mess up things like the browser’s history list, tables of cached items, and your bookmarks file.

Standalone Images

The most common use of standalone images is on a page with a lot of little images where clicking on one of them loads a larger version. If you just link to the image file, it ends up in the upper left corner of the browser window, all by itself.

Use an HTML page to hold the image. This will let you center the picture and put in a page title and other information.

Text

If you’re presenting text documents on your pages, give some thought to making them easy to read.

The viewing area of your browser is much smaller than a normal printed page, so you may have to reformat your documents to fit this new environment, rather than just dropping an existing document into your HTML editor.

Don’t run text the full width of the screen. This creates long lines of text that are difficult to read. Text also needs air around it, to breathe. That’s why most printed documents have margins.

You can easily solve these problems by using the “Block quote” tag, which gives a margin on both sides of the page. You can nest Block quotes to vary the width as necessary.

You can use tables to create more complex text layouts such as columns.

You can use dictionary lists (’DL’) as a simple way of formatting text that requires indentation.

Don’t use long paragraphs of text. It’s hard to read this in printed form and, for some reason, even harder on to read on a computer screen. Try to keep paragraphs to four sentences or less.

If you specify a text font other than the default, make sure that the font (or its equivalent) is one that is standard on your visitors’ computers. And when specifying one of these fonts, don’t forget to specify the equivalent font names for other operating systems and hardware platforms as well.

And try not to put links in your text, especially in the middle of a sentence or paragraph. If you have links that relate to your text, put them at the end, like footnotes. Give your visitors a chance to read your text before sending them somewhere else.

Tables

Learn how to use tables and you will be able to perfectly control the look of your web pages. Tables let you break your page into precise segments and control the placement of graphics and text.

You can use tables to create columns and grids to contain the images and text. You can even use tables within tables to create sub-sections that can be treated as a unit. Table cells can be filled with color to add contrast to parts of the page. Whenever you see a page that looks like a magazine or a newspaper, you can be sure that the structure is based on tables.

Tables can be used as templates or style sheets to impose a uniform look on a web site. And tables can give you some of the functionality of frames, but without the headaches.

There are several ways to learn how to use tables. The easiest way is by studying table-based sites on the web. Any book that covers page layout theory and technique, such as used in newspaper or magazine, will give you some guidance in understanding the aesthetic issues involved. Go to the “Graphic Arts” section of your local library, book store, or art supply store and look for a book on the subject of page layout. Try to find one that utilizes the “grid” method.

Some problems encountered in using tables:

If your page is based on tables in may load more slowly than a page without tables. This is because the browser has to do a lot of calculations to figure out how to place all the items that are in the table. In addition, the browser may not display the table until all the text and graphic items have been downloaded.

You can speed this up in several ways. If the table is very long (more than several screens high) try breaking it into smaller tables, one above the other. Using tables this way will also make it easier to rearrange the elements on the page. Also, make sure that the height and width is specified for all the images in the table. Doing this will allow the browser to size the table before it gets all the images.

Even though tables are part of the earliest HTML standards, there are still differences in the way that they are displayed by different browsers. Getting your tables to display correctly in all the popular browsers can be a challenge. For instance, some browsers won’t display a colored cell unless there is text or an image in it. Others may vary in how they display nested tables or tables stacked one above the other.

So, as you develop your table-based pages, test them continuously with a variety of browsers. It will save from unpleasant surprises further down the line.

Another challenge is determining which parts of the table to make fixed-width (defined in pixels) and which parts to make variable (defined as a percentage of the current browser width). With a variable width table, the horizontal dimensions of the table readjust as you change the browser width.

The trade-off is that fixed width guarantees the final appearance more tightly, but the variable width can take better advantage if the browser has a larger width. In some cases, the optimum results are with a combination of fixed and variable width for the different parts of the table. Again, a certain amount of experimentation is required to find the optimum balance. Make sure that you test your table-based page at different browser widths.

Tables are one area where most WYSIWYG web page editors have problems. The editor’s display can vary greatly from what you see in the browser, especially with complex or nested tables. If you download a trial version of one of these editors, make sure you check the accuracy of how it displays tables.

As mentioned in the section on printing, tables will affect how your web pages print out.

Tables may also affect how your web page scrolls within the browser. Depending on the particular browser, the page may jump rather than scrolling smoothly.

Frames

Don’t use frames just to prove that you know how to use frames.

Your web page is small to begin with, and carving it up with frames can reduce the usable area to a tiny fraction of the screen. Some visitors will have browsers that can’t see frames, so you’ll have to maintain two versions of your site.

Don’t build your site around frames. It makes it difficult to navigate and limits you to having a very simple site. The cursor keys don’t work unless you click in the frame you want to scroll, and the browser’s ‘Back’ button may produce unexpected results.

And there’s also a good chance that a visitor’s attempt to print out your page will end in failure.

And an interesting surprise awaits the visitor who tries to bookmark one of the pages within your site. (They’ll just get the URL of your main page.)

And you may get unexpected results when a search engine indexes your site. Visitors who come to one of your pages from a search engine won’t be entering through the site’s front door and won’t see the frame that would normally be holding the page.

And if your “framed” site has links to other sites, they’ll show up within your frame, masking the identity of the other site and confusing visitors, who’ll wonder where they really are. And you won’t be able to bookmark the linked-to site.

In addition, there may be copyright issues involved if another site shows up within the frame of your site. In any case, it’s certainly unfair to the other site.

And if there’s a problem with one of your framed pages, it’ll be difficult to report since only the URL of the main page is displayed.

Frames also cause problems when the browser is called from another application. Say that you’re reading an email and someone has sent you a message which includes a link to a web site. You double-click on the link and now the browser becomes the front window and begins to load the page. If the last thing you were looking at in the browser was a frame-based site, guess what happens?

You can get some of the functionality of frames, without the complexity, by using tables to lay out your pages.

One possible use for frames is if you have a report where you want to lock the row or column titles so they don’t scroll off the screen.

Java and Javascript

A lot of people are learning how to program in Java and JavaScript. Most of their early efforts seem to be some form of nonstop, repetitive animation that is both annoying and distracting. Some applets keep the page from loading or scrolling properly.

One popular applet overwrites the browser’s status display at the bottom of the window, keeping you from viewing the destinations of the links as you move the cursor over them. It also keeps you from seeing the status of the current page as it is loading.

Another popular use for Java is to open a smaller secondary window above the browser. This may prove to be disorienting if your visitors are not ready for it.

If you are developing Java applets, you may wish to wait until you have something more worthwhile before inflicting your early efforts on unsuspecting visitors.

If you make your site so that it can only be viewed with Java or JavaScript enabled browsers, you’re making a big mistake. An even bigger mistake is to make two versions of your site — one for Java, and one without it!

What will the visitor whose browser does not support Java see at your site? Perhaps an interesting message that the site requires Java. What about the visitor with a Java-capable browser, but with Java disabled? Perhaps a dialog box with an interesting error message.

Some other considerations. Only a fraction of your visitors will have Java-capable browsers. You can test for which browser they’re using (and maintain several versions of your site), but some will be using Java-capable browsers with Java turned off due to security concerns.In this case, they may get an interesting error message from the browser’s JavaScript interpreter.

When your pages are indexed by search engines, they also take an excerpt from the beginning of the page. If the first thing on your page is a lump of JavaScript code, then this is what the search engine will show as the description of your page. Perhaps not what you had in mind.

If, however, you are designing a web-based application to be used on a private Intranet, you may have a valid reason for using one of these new technologies.

Hard Copy

What do the pages on your site look like when they are printed out? Try it. You may be in for a surprise.

You might want hard copy because it makes it easier to design and edit your pages. Just like an advertising layout.

It gives co-workers and customers a way to view and comment on your pages. You can print out information rather than writing it down.

Your visitors can print out a hard copy of the information on your site for later reference.

If you’re using tables to control the layout of your page, they will also have an effect on printing. You can add some control to how the pages print. When printing, the browser may begin a new page if a table won’t fit on the current page (just as it would with an image). Judicious use of tables can force page breaks when the document prints out. But be sure to test this with different browsers.

If your browser has a “Page Preview” option, you can use this to get a preliminary idea of how your pages will print.

If your page has a lot of browser-specific code, it may not print out properly if the visitor has a different browser.

If your page has a black or colored background, it may not print properly.

If your page uses an image for the background, it will probably print without the background.

If your page uses frames, it probably won’t print correctly.

But the biggest surprise awaits those whose ultra-chic pages have black or dark backgrounds with white or light-colored text.

Should you use the latest features?

Each new browser has new HTML tags that it supports. Some are upgrades to the latest HTML standard. Some are proprietary tags for features supported only by this particular browser.

For some, the allure of a new technical challenge is too much to resist. So, instantly the web starts to blossom with pages that use these new features.

Before you start cranking out your new pages, here are some things to consider:

1. Do you absolutely, positively need this new feature for your site, or are you just using it to show off?

2. Which browsers are compatible with this feature?

3. What percentage of your visitors will be using these browsers? Is it worth implementing this feature for only a select few of your visitors?

4. What happens with browsers that don’t support these new tags, or with the right browser, but with the new feature disabled by the user? What will these visitors see?

5. Will you need special versions of your pages with code to handle different browsers?

6. Will you have to maintain several versions of your site in order to support all your visitors?

About HTML

The easiest way to learn HTML is by studying the source from other people’s pages. Most browsers will get the HTML source for the page you’re looking at. It’s also a good way to learn what makes bad pages bad.

Be careful about using new or specialized HTML features. They may not be upward compatible with the newer browsers or new versions of HTML. And it will be a very long time until your visitors have upgraded to a browser that supports these features.

Avoid using browser-specific “enhancements” that only work with one particular make or version of browser.

Use the absolutely smallest set of HTML that will do the job. Make this something you can brag about, rather than how you mastered the fancy commands.

Don’t use undocumented HTML effects to do things such as dissolves or fades. This may stop working in the next release of the particular browser you’re designing it for, and may cause some other browsers to function incorrectly.

Never forget that HTML is not a page description language or page formatting language. It is for displaying information and graphics, and for interacting with the user.

Use as many defaults as possible, Override them only when necessary, such as to set the background color to white, or to center an image.

But the best way to use HTML is not to use it. The newest WYSIWYG web page editors let you put together web pages without coding directly in HTML. It’s like using a word processor. Most of them also have a way of viewing and editing the underlying HTML code so experienced users can still have control over the fine points.

It’s like advancing from assembly language to a high-level language like BASIC. The WYSIWYG editors take care of the annoying details and free you to work at a higher level. In addition, these editors will automatically take care of a lot of the housekeeping for you, like specifying the height and width of all the images so that your page loads faster.

Most of the WYSIWYG web page editors are still in the WYSINQWYG (What You See Is Not Quite What You Get) stage, and some produce more HTML than an optimized, hand-coded page. But the extra text they produce adds little to the download time of a page, and you can be sure that the page won’t have any HTML errors in it. (If you’re really interested in how fast your page loads, how about dumping one of those animated GIFs?)

Advertising

Advertising has come to the web. You will definitely rope in some client that pays you by advertising on your page?

There is a dual benefit by getting paid advertisements on your site. It proves that your site has more visibility and reach among the surfers and it also gets you more revenue in turn.

But while other advertising media are aimed at influencing your next purchase, web ads have a completely different goal — to get a visitor to leave your web page and go to the advertiser’s site. (You only get paid if someone leaves your page and goes to the advertiser’s page.) You can be sure that the designers of the ads will try their very best to get folks to leave your page (and probably not return).

But that’s not all. You may not have any say about what the advertisement says or about the subject matter. Or even worse, what the ad does. Imagine, someone else’s animated image on your page. Hmm… Wonder why your page doesn’t load correctly any more.

A large ad at the top of your page may create a certain amount of confusion as to the actual ownership of the site. And since this is probably the first thing that loads, it’s probably the first thing a visitor will see.

If you have a commercial site, you’re going to look pretty silly with an ad for another company on your pages, especially when the goal of that ad is to get visitors to leave your site. Some might wonder why your company can’t afford to pay for its own web site.

And don’t forget the free ads that many sites carry. Sort of like paying extra for clothing that displays the designer’s name in large letters. Most of these free ads are for the latest browsers or plug-in components that you absolutely must have to view the site properly. Others have created “awards” that you can use to decorate your page. Remember that they’re also links to someone else’s site.

Is anyone getting rich from letting others put an ad on their page? Only a few of the most hit sites. For the rest of us, it’s just another get rich online gimmick.

Testing and debugging

In the real world of computer systems development, some consider testing to be the most important phase. In the world of the web, it doesn’t seem to have the same importance. Look at the many web pages with glaring errors such as missing images and non-working links.

If your web page editor has a spelling checker, use it. If it doesn’t, find another way to check the spelling.

Test your pages with several different browsers. You will be amazed at the variations in interpreting even the simplest HTML tags.

Make sure you try your pages with the browsers provided by major online services such as AOL and Prodigy. You may also want to test with previous versions of the more popular browsers. Test all your pages after making even trivial changes to your site, just to make sure you haven’t broken something. (Programmers know that you’re far more likely to introduce an error when making changes than when the original work was done.)

During development, you’ve probably done the testing of your site with all the files on the PC. Make sure you test the site after it’s been moved to the server.

Make sure that you test your pages in a way that forces the browser to get everything — both text and images. This means turning off the caching, emptying the cache from within the browser, or deleting all the files in the browser’s cache directory. This will force the browser to get everything from scratch. You’ll see how long your pages really take to load.

And while you’re doing this, you can measure your browser’s “hang time.” This is how long the browser hangs there with a blank screen before something shows up.

Now go to your browser’s options dialog and make it so that the page always has a white background and the links are their default colors (blue and red). A lot of people will have their browsers set this way to avoid viewing weird backgrounds or strangely-colored links. How does your page look with these settings?

If you can get hold of one, test your site with one of those new widgets that turns your TV into an Internet surfboard. Most of these still have just the capabilities of the very early browsers. They have lower resolution than most browsers and they reformat the page so it can be read on a TV screen.

Turn on the “don’t load images” menu item or checkbox in your browsers option settings. How does your page look without its images? Is it still possible to find your way around?

If your page uses a text font that isn’t one of the defaults, be sure that the page looks right with all the different variations mentioned here.

If your page is blessed with a Java or JavaScript widget, what happens when you look at it with a browser that doesn’t support Java? What about a Java-enabled browser with Java turned off?

If your page needs a special plug-in, or a special helper application, or uses a special file type, test to see what happens if one or more is missing or not supported. It might be enough to make Netscape toss its cookies.

As mentioned previously, there are a number of things that you can put on your page that keep the little red “download” indicator from going out after the page has finished loading. If your page has one, see what happens with different browsers. You should consider replacing these widgets with something that doesn’t keep the browser from functioning properly.

Have other people test your web site. Especially if their computer setup is different from yours.

Have other people proofread your text.

Test on different platforms. In one case, a page that looked fine on a PC didn’t fare as well on a Macintosh. And this was with the same version of the same browser. One source of problems is specifying a text font that’s only available on a PC and forgetting to add the Mac equivalent.

If you’ve got a site which has different versions, depending on the browser, you’ve really upped the ante, testing-wise.

Last, but not least, don’t forget to check your server’s error log. It’s the main error reporting and debugging tool for your site. Look for things like missing images, bad links, and errors from CGI scripts. You should check this log on a regular basis, and especially after making changes or additions to your site.

Pay attention when someone tells you they had trouble viewing your site. For every person who takes the time and trouble to write to you, there are many more who will give up in frustration.

Maintenance

It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it because change is inevitable. In nature also everything changes, seasons, color of the skies, the aroma around us and what nots! The world changes, the web changes, and one day your site will have to be changed just for the sake of changing. Thats what people want. They want design, different colors, animations, sound etc in your web site. In fact some of the hottest sites like Yahoo, Hotmail and Rediffmail have changed quite a lot since their inception if you have noticed.

Is your site easy to modify? Is it easy to make additions and changes? Some of the things that make a site difficult to change are sloppy formatting of HTML code, image maps, and a site where every page links to every other page.

Can your site be maintained or modified by someone besides you? In the world of commercial web sites, it’s more than likely your site will eventually be inherited by someone else. Have you left them a clear path to follow?

If you use browser-dependent features on your site, you will have to have two or more versions of your pages — a maintenance headache.

Format your HTML documents so that they are easy to read. Use blank lines and spaces to separate elements.

Create a set of uniform formats and styles for your pages so that you can create a new page by copying and modifying an existing page.

If you have links to other sites (”My Movies Cool Link List”), you owe it to your visitors to keep these links up-to-date and accurate. You should check them on a regular basis to change or modify links to sites that have moved, and to remove links that now lead to dead ends. Fortunately, there are a number of shareware tools that can aid in this process.

If you move your site to another URL, make sure that you leave a forwarding address at the old URL.

And make sure that your pages are current. If you have a sale, or a contest, or an offer that ends on May 25th, make sure that the page gets updated or removed within a few days of the expiration. Consider using automated maintenance to build and maintain your HTML pages.

Dead pages:

Web sites can grow to be complex, and may undergo continuous modification and evolution.

As pages become obsolete, you update the links on other pages so that obsolete pages are no longer pointed to. Since nothing on your site points to these old pages, there shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Unfortunately, there may still be links to these obsolete pages — from other people’s web sites. Three possibilities: search engines that have indexed the page, visitors who have added the page to their list of personal bookmarks, and visitors who point to your page with a list of favorite links on their site.

This can be a problem if the pages contain information that is no longer current, authentic, or accurate.

One way to see if this is happening is to check your stats to see if orphaned pages are still getting hits. If you have really good stats, they can tell you who has links that point to you.

One thing you can do when a page is dead is to delete it from the server or rename it. Either way, it will return a “not found” error when someone tries to access it. After this is done, you can re-submit the original URL to the search engines. This will force them to look for the page and, not finding it, remove it from their database. Even if you don’t explicitly submit these pages to the search engines, they will eventually look for them and find them missing.

Another thing you can do is to replace these orphaned pages with a generalized page that has a link that points to the main page of your site.

Puerto Vallarta Travel

lindiejon asked:

Hi
I v’e heard a lot about people making money off their web sites, I have 3 finished sites in limbo just wondering how I can make money fronm them and what would be the ball park figure one could make montly with 3 sites.

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nylife4ever asked:

Hi, I looking for young journalists that would like to write original papers from their point off view on the world, and i will post their stories in my web site, the point off my web site is to deliver information to people from different point off view not the usual one like news. If you interested please leave your email address in the response and I will contact you.
Thank you.
There is no paying for now, I want to see if people like my idea and your writing and with time I will pay per paper.

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me asked:


i want to start dropshipping ipod accessories or something like that on ebay, but at first i dont want to spend more that $75, just to see if it works out. where can i find a good dropshipper, that has real whole sale prices, or if their is a better way to make money off of ebay what is it.

Puerto Vallarta Travel

ùzÝ asked:


I was thinking using it for eBay but i’m not completely sure how it works?

I’ve been to http://www.doba.com you can have a free trial..i’m just wondering AFTER that do you have to pay for the item or is it just a monthly fee for access to the site?

Anyone that could give ANY information on dropshipping???

Thanks!

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winston p asked:


The kit is to help you open an ebay store. I think it walks you thru the process and gives you a list of the dropshippers. Just need to know if it is a scam or not. Money is hard to come by these days.

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