Handy hints

Turning your words into HTML is the easy part of creating web pages. Follow these hints to help save time designing your pages and make sure that they're easy for people to read.

1. Work out what you want to do first. If you're going to have more than one page with links between them, draw a diagram so you can see which ones should be linked, otherwise you'll end up with a confusing maze of pages.
2. Make your first page short and simple. People don't want to have to wait ages to download a large home page. Have a quick summary and some links to other information on more pages.
3. Don't overdo the graphics. Pictures are very nice, but they take time and money to download. If you must have lots of them, make them small and make sure you use 'alt' text for people who don't download the pictures.
4. Don't use too many headings. If you have lots, it'll be hard for people to read the text.
5. Try to avoid using special features that rely on people using a particular web browser. They may not work at all if people use a different program to read your pages.
6. If you have a long document, break it up into sections and make a miniature index so that people can jump to anchors at useful points.
7. When you give the names of files in links or 'img' tags, don't give the full path; just say where they are relative to the file that you're reading, so they'll still work if everything is moved to another drive or directory.
8. Always remember to use Unix-style forward slashes "/" in file paths, rather than DOS-style backslashes.
9. If you're using Netscape to view pages, you can drag your HTML file into Netscape window to view it.
10. Save HTML files with the '.htm' extension on a Windows system, or with a name that ends in '.html' on a Macintosh - some web browsers and servers prefer files to have names that end that way.