Webdesign

How not?

How to offend potential users

While creating homepages there are many possibilities to offend potential users. Some programmers reach this aim by implementing state of the art techniques which unfortunately don't work in all browsers. Often rare browsers, smartphones, settop boxes or blind people can't use these sites.

On the other hand there is the type Graphics Artist who implements a beautiful design but wonders why the users won't come ahead the start page with the fascinating 300k picture and the 500k Flash animation. Of course skipping had not been implemented. Who'd dare to skip such a beauty?! Maybe one should dare to open this site on an Apple iPad without a data flatrate!

So, how?

Before starting planless programming

The ideal homepage should have a sensible layout, presenting the content embedded within a decent design. The most important question should be what the potential users expect. It should be quite obvious that users of a financial homepage are primary interested in up to date information which can be accessed quickly while the site of a manufacturer of multimedia products would use lavish graphics, animations and sounds.

There is a consortium called W3C which sets the way a homepage should be programmed. This is commonly called a standard. Some producers of browsers somehow try to enhance this standard which might give nice results for a special function but gives a lot of trouble in common.

The creation of a homepage takes a lot of work and should be visible to every user as planned. As every deviation of standards doesn't ensure this anymore one should stick to it.

To program a homepage correctly it doesn't take much. At first one has to really want it. Everything else is possible with the aid of tools. A few are recommended in the following paragraph.