Remember your Audience


As you are creating your Web pages, remember that not everybody is using the same browser. Probably most of your audience is using Netscape on a PC, but do you really want to ignore the folks with character based browsers? Or the Linux/UNIX minority? (Sorry guys, but it is true!)

Give your audience fair warning if a link points to a huge image, or a page using features that are specific to a particular browser, or may actually break other browsers. (For example, moving images work fine with Netscape 1.1, but cause other browsers to die and dump core.)

Look at the log files and see what browsers people are actually using. Try to get a copy of the most popular ones, and see what your pages look like with them. Pay attention to comments and other feedback. Keep creating something new, so people will want to come back again and again.

As time passes, you will change the layout of your document directories, so that URL's will stop working. It is nice to leave a pointer to the new location in the old location. Using server-side includes, you can log pages that refer to the old location, so that you can inform the webmaster at that site of the change. As your directory structures change, so do those of others. Ocasionally visit every page you are linking to, to be sure that they still exist.

When making refrence to a site, use a fully qualified hostname. Don't assume that all your audience is in the same DNS domain, even for a corporate internal Web Server.


Outline


Ben Spade
Not responsible for errors in spelling or facts.