How Web Sites Are Done Right...

On this page, I am going to go into detail about how I think a proper web site should be done, what characteristics it should have, and how I create web sites that satisfy those criteria. If you will take the time to read this page, you will not only find out a great deal about how I think web sites should be done, but you may also learn a good amount about web site technology.

Place your mouse over words or phrases that are in italics and underlined for a short explanation of the word or phrase.

Keep the Goal of the Site In Mind

You want a web site because you are either:

  • a business and you have a product or service to sell, or
  • you are an organization and you want to publicize your organization, or
  • you need a computer program or application that is accessible from any computer with a browser and that doesn't need any special software installed, a web-based application.

In the first two cases, the first page of your site is where you have to grab the visitor's attention and induce them to stay in your site, and explore it, to find and purchase a product or service, or find out more about your organization.

For a web-base application, you still need a site that runs fast, that performs as well as a desktop application program.

Make It As Small As Possible

To accomplish the goals stated in the first two cases, it is important that the first page be rendered as fast as possible. It has been determined that a large number of visitors won't wait more than a few seconds, in the range of three to five seconds, for a page to be rendered before giving up and moving on to another site. This means that the first page should consist mostly of text, with very few graphic images. Furthermore, graphic images should be kept as small as possible.

This doesn't mean that the other pages can take a long time to render, just that they can take somewhat longer to render because the visitor is interested in seeing more of your site and will tolerate a longer wait for the other pages to render.

For a web-based application, not only does the first page need to render as fast as possible, all of the pages should be just as fast to render. Here, the consideration is worker productivity — You don't want your staff to have to wait a long time for the next page to render.

How To Make It As Small

The most basic issue here is how many characters must be sent from the web server to the visitor's browser. Since most people have a reasonably fast DSL or cable connections, a few, small, graphic images won't slow the transmission time down to unacceptable levels. Show Details

While it is not possible to do much to reduce the amount of text that is being transmitted, you can reduce the number of characters of other parts of the site. A typical page of a site actually consists of several files that need to be downloaded in order to render the page, and in their raw form, they can be rather large. The visitor is not directly aware of these other files, but they are required because they are essential to the appearance and functioning of the site. Some of these files can be compressed, reducing their size, and the time it takes to download them, by as much as 75%. This also tends to speed up the rendering of the page because the browser doesn't have to scan through as much code. While I can't control how fast any particular browser renders a page, I do at least try to reduce the download times and amount of work the browser has to do to render a page. Show Details