Allie's Tips for Great Doll Site Design
A great site is hardly the defining factor in determining good dollers (perhaps that would be. . . good dolls?), but it can't hurt to follow some sensible standards when you are making your site. Viewers don't need to be distracted by a design, but rather the design needs to complement what you are offering for them to see (of course if what you are offering is website designs, then well, whatev). Just as importantly, a website needs to be easy for you to maintain yourself. Good coding habits can help both of these situations.
Quick Fixes
- Don't skimp on using proper coding.
- Put all your paragraphs in <p> and </p> tags even if it'll work fine with two <br/> tags. They are paragraphs, after all. Learn what tags are supposed to reflect, rather than memorizing the effects they give. Instead of thinking 'a paragraph tag makes a line inbetween things' think 'oh a paragraph tag sets apart a paragraph! excellent!'. Proper coding becomes much easier then.
- Keep whitespace in your files,
- it'll make them so much easier to read. If you nest tags(a tag inside of a tag), such as <div> tags or <table> tags, then perhaps indent the tags that are inside those so that there's a logical grouping there.
Always set your background and font colors.
People like to assume that every browser displays black text on a white background. It just isn't so. Besides, it's a good habit to get into. Set them both. Even if it's to black or white. There's a neat little shortcut for hex codes, so you can just use #FFF for white (instead of #FFFFFF or "white") and #000 for black (instead of #000000, or "black"). It's an easy way to do greys. Colors take a bit more work on this 8)
Cute little {} or = = around your links, don't use them.
They're are cute, yes. I used to use them. But they get kinda annoying because they make the links harder to read. Keep your links simple so your site is easy to navigate and you dont' have to explain everything.
ALT Should Replace Images, not Supplement Them
Frightening but true. ALT text is "Alternate" text, it's supposed to show up to make you realize that there's an image not there :] If you want to describe your doll, use "TITLE" instead. In face, just kinda highlight the letters ALT and type in title :] Lowercase though. And also add something like alt="doll" so that if someone wanders on your site and can't view images, they'll know what they're missing out on. And also so you can check to see if all your images are showing! Those of you with Internet Explorer may think this is dumb, but really, you should do this. It'll go a long way to making more of your visitors happier!
Structural Issues
Try to avoid designs that involve iframes or pop ups.
Iframes are pretty messy to work with and they can be achieved with more elegant ways of coding (look into PHP includes for an example). Popups just smack of spyware infestations, even if they're benign, leaving your visitors with an unsettled feeling when they visit your site.
Use an external stylesheet.
This will also go a long way to making your pages more comprehensible. If you define styles in the middle of every single tag, it'll take you a lot longer to realize what those tags are and how they're working. If you define them at the start of the document. then all your files are that much bigger and take longer to download. If you link to them from one master .css file, then you save on both of these. However you can do css in all these ways for a reason; sometimes you may randomly decide on precisely one page you want to turn a paragraph blue. not all the paragraphs, just one. It'd be silly to add that to your master stylesheet, because then that would be a useless line downloaded over and over and over. It'd be silly to add that to the top of your document, because then you'd have to make exceptions for all the other paragraphs. That would be where you'd want to use style="". If you wanted to turn all the paragraphs blue on that page, then you'd put it at the top of the document. If you wanted to turn every single paragraph on your site blue though, you'd want to put that in the external file. It's not really as complicated as I've made it here!
Use CSS Properly.
If you don't know what Cascading Scroll Sheets can do for your doll site, Investigate These Sites. CSS is basically all those little neat attributes you put inside tags, except you can put them somewhere outside of tags to make your tags more readable If you've ever typed style="" then you've used CSS. See the next header for more info!
Don't bother trying to protect your images.
Seriously. This is the internet; people are masters of doing that stuff. Most "right click protection" is very easily gotten around, and you'll just annoy innocent viewers who like to use right clicking to browse (you should try it, it's a wonderful way to avoid having to move your mouse forever far there's a back button right there!) Most people really don't have people out there who are trying to steal their work. And if they did steal works, an email to an ISP or host would be effective in seeing that they don't steal images any more. But they're probably not making money anyways, and if you're not making money, all you need to worry about is the name recognition. You don't have to guard your pixels with your life.
Reconsider your Terms of Use.
The internet has long been seen as a bastion of freedom. Sure you can request people to use your images in certain ways, but some people come up with some pretty ridiculous things that start to limit the free spirit that the web encompasses. Consider researching Copyleft or the GPL and the ideals there.
And perhaps most important,
use a couple different browsers to check your site in. It's the least you could do.