Designing Your Own Webpage

Almost anyone can put together a webpage or even a website, but if you want a functional and attractive site you are going to have to put some thought and planning into the process. There are many website programs to choose from to help you accomplish putting the actual pages together. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), are programs that are the easiest to use for the beginner but can write messy HTML code. Bad code slows down or even can prevent the webpage from being displayed. Even if you use a WYSIWYG program it is a real advantage to learn HTML so you at least have an idea what coding needs to be corrected if something isn't working the way you want.

If you are overwhelmed by the thought of doing this yourself, take a basic course! You won't regret it!

The first step you should take is to organize your content and plan the navigation links. Keep it simple and straight forward, if people can't find what they are looking for easily they may get frustrated and leave.

The Colors and Background you choose set the whole feel for the website so use something that compliments what you want to present. Try to put together a color scheme or plan before you even start to build your website. Use a background that will work with you and not against you, busy high color/contrast backgrounds can make the text difficult or even impossible to read, subtle, soft backgrounds are best if you have a lot of text information to present.

Set the background color to the same general color as the background graphic, if by chance the background image doesn't load, then the website will still look okay. Make sure the background color/graphic of the webpage works with the text colors you've chosen, you want your text to be easy to read!

And... if you do have to use that fancy background you love but it just won't work there are a couple of things you can do and still use it...first try changing the color of the text to contrast with it, eg. if the background is very dark make your text very light. If this doesn't help try putting all your text in tables with a solid background color.

When using a bordered background, use tables to layout your page. Make a 2 column table and put everything in the right column, this will keep your text and pictures lined up and off the border graphic.

Use buttons and graphics that work with the background you've chosen. Do they look out of place?...Does the color scheme work? If the button has an edge or a shadow, does it match the background?

Use attributes in your Image Tags to control how your buttons display. If the button is a link and there is no border tag in the Image attributes an edge will show up around the image. To remove the edge you need to add or set the border attibute to 0.

here's the example


Basic HTML code for Images
<img src="grrrfix04.gif" width="100" height="54" border="1" alt="text here">
the image src is the file name of the graphic
height and width should be set to the graphics correct size in pixels
the "alt" attribute controls the text that will display when the user moves their curser over the button.

Last but not least, keep your website loading FAST! Keep your entry page under 60 kb, as people with slow internet will get frustrated and will leave if it takes too long to load. Although your content pages can be larger (150 kb MAX!), avoid putting too much content on each page. The average person doesn't like to scroll down more than about 3 screens, so if a page is getting too long it would be better to add another page.

If you keep your pictures around 20 to 30 kb in size you can put 3 to 5 pictures on each page. Or if you do want loads of pictures on one page you can list them as thumbnails with a link to the larger picture.

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Not only will designing and maintaining your own website save you money and give you the freedom to change things and update when you want, but it's fun!