Why is a great site?

Custom-tailor the data to user preferences

    One from the Web’s strengths is the level of information available. That’s also certainly one of its weaknesses. Websites that offer personalization features (Mylook, Slashdot.org) permit the user to filter the information they see. The way forward for the net are “one-to-one” Internet sites. These automated, database-driven sites adapt the information, advertising, as well as the appearance to individual users. Technologies for example Web Objects and Cold Fusion allow webmasters to produce dynamic, interactive, and adaptive Internet sites.

    A good illustration of a 1-to-one Site is cinternet. cinternet began with two in-house proprietary content delivery systems: Prism and Dream (2). Prism, or Presentation of Real-time Interactive Service Material, was the website management and page generation engine behind the web pages of cinternet. CNET has since developed a more elaborate page-delivery system, Story Server, which forces CNET and also the newer spinoff sites of shareware.com, search.com, and news.com. Story Server, marketed by Vignette, is really a database-driven, template-based Site publishing system, which we (internet.com) are transitioning to for the sites (internetnews.com may be the first site to become transformed into Story Server).

    Template-based database publishing systems tend to be more effective and consistent for publishers, give users a more potent more targeted experience, so when along with ad software, give advertisers greater clickthroughs. Story Server stores content and graphic elements inside a Sybase database, so that as visitors request a webpage the information is “put” quickly into design templates.

    Dream, or Delivery of Real-time Enhanced Messages, may be the advertising content delivery system cinternet began using in December 1995. Dream dynamically creates ad pages according to individual customer characteristics, including hardware platform, browser type, host service, and domain. cnet’s 1,000,000+ users receive much more specialized attention, how old they are, salary, along with other census are employed when delivering ads. CNET has become using Accipiter to provide their ads, that has excellent targeting features. Most of the bigger Internet sites on the internet are utilizing these specialized Web publishing systems, like Vignette and Autonomy.

Be responsive on the 56 Kbps modem (the normal Web user).

    Use graphics sparingly to convey information. Each graphic takes another visit to the server. Consolidate neighboring graphics or use CSS’d text or table cells with background colors to hurry display. WebMonkey includes a policy “use graphics for text and graphics for text, not graphic text.” Size graphics to slot in an average user’s window (no more than 465 to 532 pixels wide [i.e., the default Netscape screen to some printed page], or for optimum screen space viewable on all platforms make use of a max of 580 pixel wide tables to suit on Mac screens). It’s not hard to find out if a site’s been designed on merely a PC, the page is simply too wide on the Mac, typically 620-640 pixel wide tables fit a PC’s monitor but they are too wide to show on the 14-15″ Mac monitor.

    Split up your tables vertically for any cascading load to look more responsive (we make use of this technique on the first page). One huge table takes considerably longer to display content than stacked smaller sized tables which display one in a time. Microsoft’s IE5 includes a FIXED table width feature that speeds table display, regrettably this really is proprietary and doesn’t focus on Netscape’s browser.

    Optimize graphic quality for Web display (no more than 20 KB per graphic). Utilize page display speedups like the Height and width attributes for images. Use JPEGs where possible and appropriate (continuous-toned images) and reduce the colour palette of GIFs to optimize quality. Provide text options to graphics for low-bandwidth users, the blind, as well as for speed. ALTernate text tags for images ought to be functional, not descriptive. When the graphic doesn’t have function, use ALT=”” (i.e., ).

    Optimize your HTML by removing excess spaces, comments, tags and commentary, especially on your house page, to reduce quality and download time. Items like Antimony Software’s Mizer and VSE’s HTML Turbo automate this method by removing excess figures and HTML to optimize your HTML and JavaScript. I by hand tune the house page for minimize quality (typically 14-15K for that HTML page), however these products might help even file-size obsessed webmasters like myself. These items are drag and drop, and really should be utilized for the final step before you decide to upload your page (the files are not as easy to see after most of the returns are removed). After optimization your website can look to snap to the screen.

Be readable.

    Make your website as readable as you possibly can. Black text on the white-colored background (because this page is to establish) may be the easiest to see. I have seen some extremely difficult to see pages which use backgrounds exactly the same shade because the text (dark text on the dark background the other way around). If you utilize experience, stick to the lighter shades and allow the text stay black. Make use of a wide and short (we use 700 X 16 pixels) background graphic that’s non-interlaced and under 1K or . HTML 4. now includes style sheets that may control page, link, and text color attributes site-wide, making maintenance easy.

Resourse: http://webreference.com/

Great SharePoint Site Design in Only 30 Minutes