Web Site Creation and Evaluation

 

Things to think about when you create your own Web-site

 

Choices to make

Why?

Advice

Frames  No Frames

 

Older browsers cannot view frames

Experiment with both

Short amount of text per page    Long amount of text

Viewers tend not to scroll down

One to two screen-fulls per page

Text colour   

 

Viewers must be able to read it

Green on red background is difficult to read

Light (white) shows up on dark

Dark (black, blue) shows up on light (white, yellow)

Background colour

 

Colours are brighter on Macs than on PCs

Avoid very bright colours

Graphics   No Graphics

Graphic format

 

Graphics take longer to load

Graphics make the web attractive

Use a picture gallery

Use decorative page dividers

Use low resolution to keep size down

Use GIF images

Alternative text

For browsers which do not show graphics or have them turned off

Give a short description of the picture

Sounds     No sounds

 

Sound files are usually large

Try to create your own recording

Links outside the site (remote links)                  No links

Viewers may be distracted from your site

Viewers love to visit sites you recommend

Check that the links work

Links within the site

 

Link each page to the Home page at least

Animation   No animation

Animation format

 

It may be annoying

Older browsers cannot view animation

 

Meta tags     No meta tags

Search engines find these

Edit the HTML code

Within the <HEAD> tag insert

<META NAME=”description”  CONTENT=”This site has information on mathematics”>

or

<META NAME=”keywords”  CONTENT=”algebra, mathematics”>

Publicise        Not publicise

‘Unpublicised’ web-sites may not be seen by search engines

You could submit your site to a search engine

 

Author identified      Author not identified

Do you wish to be known as the author?

Do not put personal details on the Net

Authenticity of information

References      No references

Are you providing accurate, verifiable information?

 

Site  history    

 

Information can go out-of-date

 

e-mail contact      No contact

Do you wish to be contactable?

 

Copyright awareness

There are laws about copyright

Do not use material produced by others as if it was your own

Get relevant permissions

Download time awareness

 

Viewers will not wait for slow downloads generally

Keep pages short

Variation of browser awareness

 

How will the site look on Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator or other browser?

Try to use different browsers to view your own site

State the purpose of your web-site

Not state the purpose

 

Personal site? Educational?

Fictional? Factual? Promotional?

 

 

Build off-line     Build on-line

 

Web creation tools are often provided online but it takes time and time costs money to stay on-line!

Try some site-builders

e.g at http://www.tripod.lycos.com/build

 

See some other site-builders

Use specialized web-creator package

Use non-specialised package

 

Good sites can be created using relatively simple text-editors such as Microsoft Word or similar

Use the ‘Save as Web-page’ or ‘Create as Web-page’ option and then check it on your browser

Site design and structure

Page linkage

Page layout

 

Consistency of page lay-out helps viewers

‘Storyboard’ your site

Plan the links

Decide on your template or use one provided by a ‘wizard’

 

 

Have a look at

An Algebra Web-site

 

Look at other pages for Evaluation tips

 

Evaluation tips

 

 

Page created by Neil Hallinan    Reviewed: 14 Nov 2001

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