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About the Web Guide
OmniUpdate @ De Anza
Web News and Tips
Web Site Publishing Process
Creating Your Web Site
Using Your Web Account
Web Site Template
Accessibility Standards
Web Development Software
Definitions
Getting a Listserv
Appropriate Use
Web Team
Report Broken Links
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Web Publishing Guide
Helpful Hints
Keep the following points in mind when developing your site:
- Make your site easy to use.
- Keep your Web site current and
accurate.
- Assist people who link to your site.
- Test your site.
Make your site easy to use.
- Remember to name your home page "index.html."
If you don't, people may connect to your directory and get a raw directory
listing or error message instead of your starting page.
- Keep the home page as short as possible. Don't put
everything into one huge page. Your visitors won't read it.
- Visitors often come to your site via a search engine,
bookmark or link. They don't always come through your "front door."
Remember to put a link on every Web page in your site back to your home page
and to the De Anza home page. For an example, look at the navigation in this
document. It shows where this page fits in the Web Guide, and also provides
links back to higher levels in the college Web hierarchy. Using the site
template will help you organize the navigation on your site.
- Keep image file sizes small. Many people are using
modems from home. Something that loads quickly on a machine on campus could
take several minutes to load on a machine using telephone connections. Is
the picture really worth frustrating someone?
- Be careful with background colors and background images.
They may look fine on a 256-color monitor, but could make your page unreadable
on black and white or 16-color monitors.
- Break up your text into small paragraphs, or "chunks."
Make text lines short. If you use tables to control layout, limit text from
spreading more than 400 pixels (5.5 inches) across the page. (The template
automatically does this for you.) Visitors scan rather than read Web pages,
so try to put information in chunks. Long lines of text are tiring on the
eyes.
Keep your Web site current and accurate.
- Routinely check your Web site for links that no longer
work and fix them.
- Routinely check the content on your Web site for accuracy.
Remove any outdated information and add new information as appropriate.
Assist people who link to your site.
- Don't change the file names of published pages. Changing the name will
break all links and bookmarks that point to the old file name. For example,
if you revise your site, don't change the file "staff.html" to "staff-list.html"
because this will break everything linking to "staff.html."
With this in mind, please choose file names that are easy to understand so
that you can be happy with them for a long period of time. If you need to
change a file name, especially with the intent of making your URLs easier
to use and remember, please contact the college
Web coordinator in order to have a pointer from the old page to the new
page created. This way, if you must rename or move a Web page, users will
still be able to find it, and other site owners will have a chance to update
their links.
Test your site.
- Test your site with different Web browsers. Check it out on different
monitors, smaller screens and different platforms.
- Search engines cannot index text that is found in images. Therefore, test
your Web pages using the Lynx text-only Web
browser. This will show any difficulties that search engines will have
indexing your site and will also show problems that disabled people may have
using your site. Ideally, your Web site should be usable in the absence of
images. When images are used, remember to use ALT tags and adhere to other required
accessibility standards.
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