10 tips for a great homepage

March, 1999.
By Molly E. Holzschlag. (Link to original article.)

Making a homepage is easy. Making a good one that people will talk about is not.

A great homepage will help you make friends, have fun, and maybe even make money!

We know you want homepage success. Here are ten easy steps to help you achieve it.

1. Organize your stuff

tart by arranging all the information you want on your homepage into sensible categories. Whether you're designing a single page or a site with many pages, getting organized will help visitors to your site understand what you're trying to do.

Categories might include:

• About Me.
• My Family/My Pets.
• My Hobbies.
• Photo Album.
• Poems and Stories.
• Favorite Links.
• Sign My Guestbook.

2. Say it straight and stick to it

What's your homepage about? If your intent is not made immediately clear, people visiting your site will quickly lose interest and leave. You need to "hook" people in right away on the first page and let them know why they should click to see the other pages. Know what role you want your homepage to play, and stick to that focus. Avoid common pitfalls by following these tips:

• Don't link to someone else's page from your first page. Keep them interested and involved in your Web site.
• Don't advertise favorite browsers and Web products on your main page. If you want to offer helpful advice to others about how to best view your site, create a help page and put that information there.
• Unless you update your pages regularly, don't tell people when the page was last updated, and don't put time-sensitive information on it. If you're offering Christmas greetings to a July visitor, they'll think your whole site is stale.

3. Leave sensitive info at home

You want people to visit your homepage, but you might not want those same people showing up at your front door! To avoid unwanted pests and protect yourself against possible harassment, take these precautions:

• Never put your home address on a Web page.
• Do keep your home phone number private.
• Always think carefully before putting very personal information on a page.
• Use email as the point of contact for your page visitors.
• Never put your home address or phone number in your public email signature.

4. Avoid overload!

Many pages suffer from the "too much stuff" syndrome. Clutter can make visitors feel cramped and unhappy, just like Great Aunt Sally's small apartment filled to overflowing with knick-knacks and oversized furniture.

Avoid smothering your visitors by following the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Silly)! Think of your homepage as a small room that you're decorating. Choose light furnishings and clean surfaces for best results.

Some ways to keep homepages simple include:

• Keep your written content short and to the point.
• Any time you have a lot of content, break it up into multiple, linked pages.
• Stick to two sizes of text on a page: one for headers and one for body.
• Use margins to gain visual space.
• Don't break up the space with very long horizontal rules. If you're going to use a horizontal rule, keep its width shorter than the width of your text.
• Graphics should be visually proportionate to the rest of your page information.
• Only one thing should blink or move on a given page.
• Keep pages light--any page weighing more than 65K needs a diet! Do you want to have to wait 5 minutes while a homepage loads?!

5. Save our eyesight!

Those of us with good vision want to keep it that way, and those with failing vision don't want to make it worse. No one appreciates having to squint to read a Web page. Your consideration can help preserve our precious eyesight.

Follow these tips to make your homepage easy on the eyes:

• Bolding and italicizing text actually makes text harder to read. Use bold and italics for emphasis only.
• Similarly, centering body text makes it very hard to read. Gain space by using margins rather than centering for body text. You can center headers, footers, and accent text.
• Don't use complicated backgrounds that interfere with text. Plain backgrounds are almost always best with any text.
• Use contrasting colors for backgrounds, text, and links. The higher the contrast, the better the readability. White text on a yellow background is just annoying.
• Keep body text at its default size.
• Don't use code that will prohibit resizing of text. For example, if you're using a technology called Cascading Style Sheets, don't set your text using pixels, as this disallows a user from resizing default text in his or her browser. Use points instead.

6. Scan smart

Scanning original photos and artwork is a great way to get content for your site. But if you scan your work improperly, the results will be poor graphics.

Follow these tips for successful scanning:

• Clean your scanner surface and the items to be scanned. Check with your scanner's documentation for the best way to clean your scanner. To clean photos and art work, use canned air--available at most office and art supply stores--to blast away smudges and dust.
• Scan your file at 72 DPI (dots per inch). This setting is found in your imaging software.
• Use your imaging software to crop and refine the scanned image.
• Save the file at 72 DPI, the standard measurement for Web graphics.

7. Take advantage of free graphics

Web graphics should be attractive and download quickly. If you don't know how to work with Web graphics, you can learn from many helpful tutorials. If you want to use clip art, photos, and animations--but you're not an artist--there are free and inexpensive resources that you can tap into for your homepage.

Visit these fantastic sites and get a graphic life:

• Barry's Clip Art Server serves up a great big helping of clip art, animated GIFs, related links, and helpful software.
• The whole clip and caboodle can be found at Caboodles of Clip Art.
• ArtToday is a membership-oriented site that offers all the clip art, animations, photos, and fonts you can download for $29.95 per year! There's lots of free stuff, too.

8. Avoid the unnecessary

So maybe you've learned how to add sound, scrolling marquees, and JavaScript animations to your page. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should! Everything on a homepage should have a reason for being there. Remember that these elements slow loading time and can cause people's computers to crash.

Consider each specialty item carefully:

• Does this sound recording really play an important role in the experience of my homepage?
• Does my pop-up window have a serious function other than to say Hi!?
Is my Web counter really giving me useful statistics, or did I put it there to gratify myself?
• Does my JavaScript mouseover have aesthetic appeal?
• Is my scrolling marquee an addition or distraction?

Count your specialty items. If you've got more than two on any page, you're probably into overkill!

9. When is it ok to borrow?

A lot of information sharing goes down on the Web. Below are selected questions and answers concerning what information is okay to use on your pages, and how.

1. Is it okay to swipe HTML code?

While many people, including myself, use the View Source feature on a browser to look at the way code is written, it's not right to simply swipe it! Be inspired by it, use it as an example to learn from, but don't just take it. Even though HTML code itself cannot be copyrighted, I encourage you to learn how to work with it, or to use software that generates it for you if you don't want to learn it yourself.

2. Is it okay to "borrow" a graphic from someone else's page?

Without express permission, don't put other people's work on your Web site. Learn to create your own graphics, or use graphics that are royalty free, such as those available from the Web sites I mentioned earlier.

3. Can I put quotes from articles, books, movies, and so forth on my page?

If you use one paragraph or less, place it in quotes, and clearly state the source, you are following the general rules of what is known as "fair use." Be cautious and fair, however. Anything more than a paragraph can be considered infringement of copyright, and if you use someone else's work without referencing the source, you're guilty of plagiarism! Stay safe and honest--always ask for permission before using materials that are likely to be copyrighted.

It's also a good idea to protect your own work. If you have original art, writing, and music on your pages, it's a good idea to copyright it. You can learn more about copyright with a visit to these sites:

• The United States Copyright Office.
• The Canadian Intellectual Property Office.
• Ten Big Myths About Copyright Explained.
• An Intellectual Property Law Primer for Multimedia and Web Developers.

10. Challenge yourself!

If you're enjoying the process of creating a homepage and want to get more adventuresome with Web page design, take the time to learn how it's done. Here are a few hand-picked Web sites where you can get more information on how to design your pages:

• The Web Developer's Virtual Library has virtually tons of information for aspiring Web designers.
• The Web Design Community on MSN offers helpful newsgroups, free design classes, a Homepage Help Desk, and lots of support for newcomers to Web page design.
• Builder.Com is a magazine-style site with endless resources for those with intermediate to high-end interests.