Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Site-Seeing: Chapter 3

> The construction of your site is one of the most important elements that will either make or break your site. If the audience finds it hard to search for what they are looking or if, most frustrating, your site is slow with download times, then your aggravated users will not return to your site.

> The best way to ease waiting time for your audience is to use CSS, crop images to reduce their physical size and to compress photos by optimizing them. These three tips can make a big difference on minimizing download times for your web site.

> Web users love to browse/wander sites and gather information. To keep them anchored to your site you need to provide navigational tools, such as menus, links and search boxes. This will provide necessary interaction for your audience.

> It is important to let your users know the differences between your links and where they will take them. I was surprised to see that there are five different types of links, and probably more, that help us know their particular purpose. External, internal, download, inline, and action links all help your audience get to whatever content you want them to view. With all these different links it’s important to remember to keep them all short with words, provide a range of color (especially for you visited and unvisited links) and to make them descriptive.

> The site you build should contain navigational tools, content, a page title and header. You always want to have your audience’s attention focused on the content of your page and to do that, sometimes it’s easier to make your site simple, with not a lot of technology and fancy elements incorporated.

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