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As with most things in life, the devil is in the details. The same goes for Web sites. Small changes can take a ho-hum Web page and make it sing.
Don't get me wrong. Content is still king. Providing useful, timely, and helpful information is the key to a powerful Web presence. But technology combined with the use of simple philosophies can take the dull and make it stunning.
This paper focuses on easy yet highly valuable improvements that can be made to any Web site.
1. Excellent Use of Entities
Entities-or character entities-are codes used to represent special characters. For example, ™ represents the superscripted trademark symbol. But where to use it?
Try the following code in a page named trademark.html:
Cool Web Page Demo™
Wow you can get the trademark in the title line.
The superscripted trademark symbol can be seen in the title bar of the image on the next page:
Other entities, such as the copyright symbol, ©, can also be used throughout Web solution.
A list of different character entities can be found all over the Web. Some lists contain word-based entities and others, numeric entities.
2. Flyaway Menus
Flyaway menus are the drop-down and slide-in menus seen on popular Web sites like:
www.cdw.com www.msnbc.com www.aa.com
Making these menus from scratch is challenging. Taking them from existing Web sites is stealing. What if there were a place that would give flyaway menus for free for both non-commercial and commercial use? What if they also gave the code and comments on how to customize it?
The place to go is:
www.dynamicdrive.com
Specifically the "Menus and Navigation" section:
www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/index.html
I have been using menus from this site for years. You don't have to link back to them (they do like it if you do) or pay any money. For the most part, all you have to do is leave the comment in the code that you got it from them. Be sure to read the rules/license.
3. Add Database Access
Static Web pages can be useful and helpful, but as a Web solution grows, the time involved for maintenance can be counterproductive. Database-driven Web solutions that are created correctly will update and generate links themselves.
Databases make it look like the developer is doing a lot of work when in reality it takes little effort after the development. As soon as information is updated in a database, the very next person to hit a page gets the most up-to-date data.
A site that offers 50,000 products could never maintain over 50,000 Web pages. Many times, these e-commerce sites are driven by as few as 10 or 12 detailed pages. An internal project may have as few as six pages. If there are only six pages to maintain, go the extra mile and add the detail. But you could never do that with a site with 450 pages.
A scripting or programming language must be chosen to implement a Web/database solution.
4.Web Resources
There are a vast number of resources on the Web to help improve Web sites. One was www.DynamicDrive.com from a previous point. Another is www.Deja.com. This resource stands out among the rest.
Deja.com was the interface to the archive created of newsgroup postings at Deja News. It has since been acquired by Google and is a special section of Google, http://groups.google.com. This is not regular Google, but Google itself is a solid resource. Deja, now Google Groups, has been recording the textual posting in news groups since 1995. Deja is a Web-based window into this world. For non-database people, it is hard to explain the magnitude of this resource. It is over half a terabyte and searchable for free.
There is one important point when using newsgroups. It is called the "rule of 20 minutes". Being such a large resource, it will take 20 minutes or more to find a helpful answer. So, if the question is simple, look it up in a book or talk with a colleague.
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