WebCrafter.biz - Low Cost Website Design
D.I.Y. WEBSITES
Flexible width web page occupying full width of screen.
Fixed width web page, fixed to lowest browser resolution.
Using a WYSIWYG Software Package.
You may have considered that one of the solutions to
having your first web site, was to buy a software package and design a
web site for yourself. That was the route I took when I first launched
my own web site in the year 2000, blissfully unaware of all the many
mistakes I was making and the drawbacks of this method.
Building a
well designed web site is actually much more complicated than it would
first appear, as has become apparent to me over the years, and there
are
notable pitfalls that using a WYSIWYG. - (what you see is what you get)
- editor can lead you into.
I've laid out some of these pitfalls below.
FIXED OR FLEXIBLE WIDTH WEB SITES
Because how a
website appears is governed by many variable factors such as the
resolution set up for the monitor being used by the viewer, some
WYSIWYG website software packages will constrain the way your site
will appear. They do this by fixing the width of your page in pixels to
prevent you designing a web site which will force viewers using a lower
resolution to scroll sideways to see the whole of your page.
This
removes from you the option,
which can be achieved be independent coding, of designing a flexible
width web site, with minimum and maximum widths, which will adapt to
the resolution set on the viewers'
monitors, or even, as is sometimes appropriate, a website that combines
the combination of fixed and flexible width web pages. I have used this
sort of combination on my own website: see screen shots on the right.
IMAGES
Website design software packages can also encourage behaviour in the user which are hugely wasteful of server disc space and bandwidth, and can significantly slow down the loading time of the web site. Whilst the use of complicated multiple layered images and the ability to resize images on the page are apt for DTP programs on your PC, they are totally inappropriate for a web site for those reasons. With a properly designed website, these aspects of the design are dealt with on a graphics program beforehand, resulting in leaner and faster web pages.
CODE
One consequence of designing a site with a WYSIWIG editor, especially if you are unfamiliar with the use of CSS, is that the editor will allow you to make extensive use of in-line styling. The results of this will be huge pages, bloated with code specifying the styles. Again, this will be a factor in making your website slow to load, and the error can be compounded if you make extensive and frequent changes to your design over time. In my own earlier use of a WYSIWYG editor, I later found out that the underlying code was a complete dog's dinner with partially deleted fragments of code littering the page, and the same style information repeated endlessly. An additional problem is that many WYSIWYG editors will create a massive CSS style sheet in the 'head' section of each page, again contributing to slow loading times. The correct location for all style information is in a CSS style sheet, in its own exported CSS file, leaving the bare necessity of the HTML elements with their content as the occupiers of the web pages. That means that the viewer's browser only has to load one file to obtain all the information relating to style for every page on your web site: thus speeding up the loading time.
OTHER FACTORS
One of
the most popular WYSIWYG website
building software packages costs around £350.00. There are cheaper
website building products around but there are also reasons why they
are cheaper, I have tried some of them in the past and found out for
myself the hard way what their limitations are.
In terms of costs,
you will need to add to the price of the software the cost of time
spent in learning to use the software and
designing the site. More time has to be spent writing copy,
processing images for presentation on the web, finding a reliable
hosting service, finding the best company to register your domain name
and configuring their control panel to point at your website. Also
there's checking your site for errors & compatibility, and
learning how to use a FTP program to upload your files. If you have a
site with more than a few pages, it is also advisable to create an XML
site map for submission to the search engines and to write a robots.txt
file for your site. Then there are the settings in your hosting control
panel to configure, such as disabling hot linking to images to prevent
your bandwidth being stolen.
You will have to decide which is the right size of text to use and what
resolution to optimize your site for.
Depending on the complexity of
the design of website, you will find that, in many cases, I can get
you up and running with your first web presence for less than the cost
of buying the website building software package mentioned above, and
certainly a lot cheaper than when you factor in all the time spent
learning everything you would need to know to get a website designed,
uploaded, and fully functional.