- The Homepage (the first page anyone should see) for your site should be named index.html
- Ensure that your page is text-friendly (see below)
- Create a link to the menu page that your page appears on. i.e. if your page deals with education, you would most likely find it here: http://www.hwcn.org/Information/education/
- On each of your pages, place a link back to the HWCN homepage.
- A mailto: link so that people may contact you. This should be your IP email address i.e. if you are ip102 then, use ip102@hwcn.org
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- A total page size (graphics incl.) of 50 Kb or more will take at least 15 seconds to load on a 28.8 modem
- If you must have large images, you have two options.
- Compress the image so that it is still viewable yet small enough in size (jpeg images can be compressed)
- Use a thumbnail image (a small image in file size and proportions), which then links to the larger image on a new page.
- Use the HEIGHT="XXX" and WIDTH="XXX" tags on all graphics. Causes pages to render graphics faster.
- http://www.netmechanic.com/accelerate.htm - GifBot from NetMechanic checks your image size and resizes the images for you
Many users of the HWCN have text-only accounts. When browsing the Internet, they can only see the text on the pages. You should preview your pages in a text browser (i.e. Lynx) so as to ensure that your pages are viewable by text-only users.
- In lynx, type j
- Then enter the path of your web page i.e. http://www.hwcn.org/Information/arts/huta/hamlet.html
- You should be able to see major problems right away if the pages are not "text-friendly"
- Designing for accessibility aids Visually Impaired Users, Text-Only users and users of older technology in viewing your information
- Does not mean the restriction of Graphics, Sound, etc.
- Allows people other methods of viewing content
General Guidelines
Images
- Provide descriptive ALT tags for all images
Multimedia (Flash, Animation, Video, etc)
- Provide alternate descriptions for multimedia such as text links describing the media
Tables
- Try not to use tables to layout your pages. That's not what tables are for. It is alright, but you will not achieve a high level of usability
- If you use tables, remember to use column headers to describe your data
Frames
- Try to avoid frames at all costs.
Navigation
- Provide clear navigation mechanisms
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