Creating a website

Creating a website

1. When creating a website you need to decide:

   • What information needs to be included
   • How many pages you need
   • The type of information that will go on each page
   • Who your audience is- who you want to read it
   • The order pages should go in
   • Which pages link together to take you from one to the other
     • To do this effectively, you need to produce a site map

2. Homepages are very important therefor you must ensure that

   • The page is quick to download (no large files)
   • There is a a relevant title in legible font and colour
   • The purpose of the website is clear
   • The layout is attractive and not too complicated
   • There is a menu with links to the other sections in the website

3. Titles, headings and texts must be kept consistent by:

   • Keeping the same font and size and limit the font colour to no more than 3. Style sheets can help with this
   • Keeping backgrounds consistent
   • Keeping main objects like logos and navigation buttons in the same place
   • Using consistent colours for hyperlinks and clicked hyperlinks

4. Consistency is important as it helps to breed familiarity and recognition

5. Navigation

   • You can navigate by using a hotspot, hypertext, browser 'forward' or a button

6. Languages

   • you can choose from a text editor, where you type every instruction and detail using HTML, or a web authoring software which will automatically generate HTML for you
   • You can also combine both types, for example, use a web authoring software to design the webpage and then edit the commands and make your own adjustments

7. How do webpages work?

   • Graphics, animations, video and audio files are not stored as part of each web page
     • the web page has frames to load these objects into whenever the page loads, this means that bigger files only need to be stored once
     • This means you can't move files or rename them because they won't be found or loaded if you do
     • Keep all files in the same folder as your website.html file
   • Use multimedia files sparingly as they can take up lots of memory and slow down the website
     • They can also be very irritating
     • Make sure the multimedia has a purpose
     • If you have to use them, have them load through a button so people only see them if they want to

8. Testing your website

   • Test all hyperlinks
   • Ask a friend to test the website for you
   • Check spelling, punctuation and grammar
   • Ask a friend to proofread it for you
   • Make sure the software programmes allow you to check download times of your files

Images and files in the map