Fundamentals

What makes a good web site?

The magic word here is INFORMATION.

When people log onto your website they are looking for information.

Give them details about yourself, what you do, where you do it and who you do it for.

The site should be visually pleasing, however if the information is what the viewer is after then they will forgive an ugly site.

Agents and corporate clients use the internet to assess your professionalism. A well designed site, apart from boosting your confidence, will instill a degree of assurance in the booker.

To compete in a corporate world you have to look the part and a well designed website will promote how you want to be perceived in terms of professionalism and presentation.

Navigation; make it easy for the visitor to get around your site, a well laid out navigation structure says a lot about your attitude and respect you would give an audience, which is what a website visitor is in essence.

Have a site map; a site map is just an ordered list of all of the individual pages that go to make up a website. Its main purpose is so that the search engines can find it and use it to access all of the other pages quickly. It’s as much a polite service to visitors as it is an essential search engines tool. For people who don't want to, for example, got to a galleries page and explore its contents then a site map is a convenient way of finding an individual gallery page. Search engines look specifically for site maps.

To get search engines to your website is beyond the scope of this article; however here are a few pointers.

Every website page consists of code the most common of which is HTML, this is what the search engines read and it must follow certain rules for the engines to read it quickly and correctly.

Try this;

• If you are using Internet Explorer 6 go to the toolbar at the top of the page, click on view and then select View Source.
• If you are using IE 7 go to the toolbar, click on Page and then select View Source.
• In Netscape and Firefox go to the toolbar, click on view and then select Page Source.

What you will see is the HTML code that produces this page.

At the very top is:!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"

This is called a document type declaration and it informs the search engines what language the site is written in.

Without this the search engines go into ‘quirks mode’ and try to read the code as best as they can.

• This slows the process down.
• But worse still it can be interpreted wrongly and your site will have pieces missing or in the wrong place.
• Worst of all, the entire whole site might be ignored because it doesn’t conform to standards and will take too long to read.

If this is missing you are already on an uphill struggle.

The rest of the code is, again, beyond the scope of this article. If you are interested in the code behind websites then you can learn a lot by viewing the source on various sites.