Frequently (and Infrequently) Asked Questions
Or... Everything you always wanted to know about web authoring but were afraid to ask
If you have any suggestions for questions to be covered here, please e-mail
Web and Learning Technology.
How do I make sure my pages look okay for people
with different browsers/computers?
Web designers have far less control over their end product than those who design for
print: web pages may look different depending on the user's computer, software, monitor
and so on.
- "Page size" depends on screen resolution, monitor size and
the user's preferences (do they maximise the browser window or not?). 800 by
600 pixels
is a good size to work with, although you have to allow space for scroll
bars, tool bars, etc. It's best to check your pages with the browser window set to
different sizes - what looks great on a 21" monitor can often be unusable for those
with older, smaller monitors. It works the other way around, too: if you use a background
image, make sure it looks okay on a large monitor, or you can get an effect like this: repeating background example.
- Don't forget to check to see how well your pages print out - lots of people
print web pages for reference.
- Colours can display differently, depending on platform,
monitor and software.
- It's easy to specify attractive fonts for web pages. The trouble is, if
the user doesn't have that font available on their computer, the display will default to
whatever font is specified in their browser's preferences: usually Times New Roman... If
you do choose to specify fonts for your pages, stick to widely available choices, such as Times New Roman, Arial, Comic Sans, Verdana, Georgia or Courier.
- People use a huge variety of web browsing programs, including Internet
Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Lynx, screen readers, and
specialist browsers for palmtops and mobile phones. Each of these could
easily display a web page in a slightly different way. It gets even more
complicated when you consider the different versions of a particular browser: Internet
Explorer 6 will typically display a site quite differently to Internet Explorer
7. There's probably not much point worrying about the more obscure browsers,
but you should certainly check pages in a reasonably up-to-date version of
Internet Explorer and Firefox, and you
should be aware that users view your pages in a variety of ways.
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How do I get my pages to the top of search engines'
results listings?
With difficulty... But there are lots of things you can do to improve the
performance of your web pages, both with the University's search facility and
with external search engines. For explanations and advice, see
A web author's guide to search engines.
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Why can't they see my page? Good practice in naming files
and hyperlinks
- Case sensitivity
- Filenames on the privatewww server are case sensitive: if, for example,
a file is called wibble.htm a link to WIBBLE.HTM or even Wibble.htm will not find it.
- Filenames on our main web servers are not case
sensitive.
- It's generally good practice to stick to lower case filenames: it's
easy to remember and it will work on all web servers.
- Spaces in filenames
Web browsers can sometimes hit problems with filenames that include spaces.
In particular, if someone tries to e-mail a URL that contains a space the
resulting link in the e-mail is likely to be broken.
- Linking to your own hard drive
Some web authoring programs make it easy to link directly to a file on your own hard disk:
when you check the page in a browser it all works fine, but when anyone else tries to use
it, they can't follow such links. In such cases, the link will look something like
"file:///C:/mywork/webpage.htm". It's the kind of problem that can be hard
to spot, but it's something to consider if someone reports a broken link.
- Appropriate extensions - what the htm is asp?
Web pages can have a variety of file extensions, including .html, .htm,
.asp, .aspx, .shtm and .shtml. These extensions have specific meanings (eg .aspx
tells the webserver to process the page within the .net programming
framework). Generally, it's best to stick to .htm/.html extensions unless you know what you want.
- Index and default pages
The main page in each directory and subdirectory should be given a standard filename. On
the main servers this could be index.htm, default.asp, default. aspx or a
few others; on privatewww it should be index.html or index.htm.
One advantage of this convention is that it shortens the URL of your main pages:
"www.essex.ac.uk/blah/" points to the same page as
"www.essex.ac.uk/blah/default.aspx" - saving space on your business card, if
nothing else!
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Why can't I see your page?
Not a web author's question, but it's the cause of a lot of the queries sent to the
University webmaster. There are three main causes of this:
- Someone has moved or renamed their files. If you have to do this, it's
good practice to inform anyone who has links to your pages, otherwise those links will be
broken, users will get error messages and your site will lose valuable
traffic. Even if you do this, however, the chances are
that users will continue to follow old links to where your old pages were, as the URL will
continue to show up in search engines' results, printed literature, etc: if you've moved or renamed a file, you can
leave a file in the old location with a link pointing users to the new file, or to your
home page; if you're comfortable with meta tags you can automatically redirect users to
the appropriate page.
- There is something wrong with the file (see Why
can't they see my page? above) or the link itself. If you discover that a link to your pages
from someone else's site is incorrect, let them know - they'll be grateful, and you'll be
helping your potential audience find you.
- Most of the University website is public, but certain areas and files are restricted to campus-only
access. If any of your pages are restricted in this way you should
annotate any links to those pages so that it is clear to non-Essex users
that they will be denied access - just put something like "campus-only
access" in brackets after the link.
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Why don't my links work?
- Have you refreshed the page in the browser (see below)?
- Have you checked that the URL in your hyperlink exactly matches the URL of
the page? Even a slight typing mistake can break a link.
- Has the page you're linking to been moved, deleted or renamed?
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I've edited my page but when I look at it in the browser
nothing has changed
Did you save the changes before looking at the page in the browser? If you have, then
you should use the browser's refresh/reload button to fetch a fresh copy of the page from
the server (or from wherever you have saved it). If you keep a copy of your web page on
your own hard disk and a copy on the web server, make sure you are changing and checking
the same version of the page.
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GIFs, JPEG and PNGs - which format for graphics?
There are three standard formats for graphics on the web: GIF, JPEG and PNG.
Each has pros and cons:
- GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
Limited to 256 colours, one of which can be set to be transparent. Good for small, simple
images, or for images that use large blocks of a single colour. Not so good for colourful,
detailed photographic-type images.
- JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
Good for colourful, detailed photographic-type images. Not good for large areas of flat
colour. JPEGs use a form of "lossy" compression: when an image is
saved, information is removed from the file in order to reduce its
file-size. Most graphics programs allow you to change the level of
compression. Highly compressed jpegs lose detail and areas of colour can
look speckled and broken up. Beware: every time you save a JPEG it applies the
compression, so a JPEG opened and saved several times progressively deteriorates; keep a
master copy of the image in a loss-free format (TIFF, or Photoshop's PSD) in case
you need to make any changes at a later date.
- PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
PNGs were
introduced as a replacement for GIFs:
- to overcome legal problems (the GIF format is protected by patent, which means it's only
legal to produce them using licensed software; in practice, this is hard to enforce and,
in any case, most of the major software suppliers are licensed, including Microsoft, Adobe
and JASC);
- to improve on quality, including better control of transparent areas of images, no
palette restrictions (the 256 colour limit of GIFs); PNGs have been adopted as a web
standard by the World Wide Web Consortium, so it's likely that they will become
increasingly popular.
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How do I get rid of the blue border in an image link?
When you use an image as a link, a border
may be added automatically (the colour of the border depends on the web page's
settings for link colour). This can be distracting,
particularly for images with rounded corners, as in this example.
To remove the border, most web authoring programs allow you to edit an image's
properties. In the case of SharePoint Designer and FrontPage, right-click on the image, select
Picture Properties, then the Border
Thickness to zero.
In the HTML:
Incorrect:
<a href="anotherpage.htm"><img
src="smallsmileybutton.gif" alt="this link goes nowhere..."
align="left" width="62" height="62"></a>
Correct:
<a href="anotherpage.htm"><img
src="smallsmileybutton.gif" alt="this link goes nowhere..."
align="left" width="62" height="62" border="0"></a>
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How do I add one of those cool animations to my page?
Must you...?
Okay, it's all very amusing the first time you see them. Maybe even the second. But every
time someone looks at your page? Surely you're hoping for return visitors?
If you really have to, most animations on the web are GIF files and you can create your
own in Animation Shop (which comes with Paint Shop Pro), GIF Builder, or other graphics
programs. Most people just find them free on on the web. But you really don't
want to, do you?
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Why is everything so slooooooooow...?
Speed matters: one of the most frequently-used features of the web browser is its Back
button and one of the most common reasons it's used is because pages take so long to
load... There are several things you can do to speed up the delivery of your pages:
- Make sure your main pages aren't too long. These act as your site's front
door: if they're slow, people will go away. Ideally, a starting page should
fit comfortably into a browser window that's no more than 600 pixels deep. That doesn't give you much space to play
with, but if you succeed your site is likely to be both fast and effective.
- One of the main reasons for slow pages is inappropriate use of graphics.
Image files tend to be large, so they take longer to load than a simple text-based web
page. You can reduce the size of these files with graphics software, such as Photoshop (see GIFs, JPEGs and PNGs -
which format for graphics? for more on this). Beware: don't resize an
image on the page, as SharePoint Designer, FrontPage and other authoring packages allow (by clicking on the
image and moving the handles that appear in each corner) - this changes the size the image
appears on screen, but does not affect the file-size.
- Be wary of neat tricks. Java can do some impressive things, adding
interactivity and dynamism to what can be a very dull medium. Programs like FrontPage even
make it easy to add Java applets to web pages without the author realising that's what
they are doing (hover buttons, marquees, etc). But Java applets can be very slow
to start up; what's more, while Java is starting up the
browser may be disabled, so the user can't even hit the back button... Other neat tricks
that slow web pages down include audio files, video clips, banner ads and preventing a
page from being cached. There can be good reasons for using all of these techniques, but
be wary of using them on your main pages.
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How do I capture an image from my computer screen?
If you want to grab a
screenshot, press "print screen" on the keyboard. Then in a graphics program
just paste the captured image into a new file and save it as a GIF.
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Why is there an extra blank line between my paragraphs?
Not my fault - honest! That's just the way web browsers work: every paragraph is
separated by a blank line. It's best to just accept that and work with it: people expect
web pages to look like that.
In some circumstances it's necessary to force a single linebreak. In
SharePoint Designer, FrontPage and many
other web authoring packages, simply press Shift and Return on the keyboard. In HTML, the
tag <br> has the same effect. One example of when this is a good idea is
when listing staff information:
J Bloggs, senior lecturer
Room 101
Special interests: crochet, table football and web authoring.
Beware: some people use linebreaks within paragraphs to force a
particular layout. This usually looks fine on their computer, but if someone looks at the
page with a lower resolution monitor, or a smaller browser window, it all goes awry (as
shown in this example of incorrect use of linebreaks).
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Which program should I use to write my web pages?
Good question. At the University we recommend SharePoint Designer,
but many web authors are still using FrontPage 2002, which is
fine. These programs include a lot of
features that make site maintenance easier and the programs are
fairly easy to learn for anyone with experience with Microsoft Word. FrontPage training is available from WaLT.
There are many other web authoring packages. Because
of the wide range of available software, it's not possible for the University to provide
support for these packages, but we'll still do our best to answer any questions.
How do I stop my e-mail address being harvested
for junk mailing lists?
'Spam-bots' are programs that work their way around the web, spotting e-mail
addresses on web pages and harvesting them for mailing lists which are then used
to offer the lucky recipients all kinds of 'products' and 'services'. It's
difficult to avoid this kind of junk mail (also known as 'spam'), but one way is
to avoid including your e-mail address in harvestable form on your web pages. It
is, however, important that web authors should be contactable through their web
pages - our guide to e-mail links on web pages
sets out the options.
How do I restrict access to my web pages?
...by following the guidance in restricting access to your web pages.