Thursday, November 7, 2024

May 20, 2002– Newsletter #181


Goodies to Go ™
May 20, 2002–Newsletter #181

This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
 


 
Goodies Thoughts – Website Design – Navigation

In the last issue of
Goodies to Go we talked about the challenges of the web designer. In this week’s
issue we’ll take a look at one of the most important elements of web design,
navigation. If a visitor can’t find what he is looking for, he won’t stay at
your site long.

 

There are several keys
to designing a site that is easily navigable. Probably the most important is not
considering yourself as the norm. Simply put, most designers have a tendency to
design the navigation of their sites according to what is intuitive to them.
However, what is intuitive to you, the designer, may not end up being intuitive
to the majority of your site’s visitors. Designing for yourself and not your
audience is probably the single most common mistake.

 

A good practice, if
feasible, is to put your navigation design down on paper or in the form of a
mock-up website. This will allow you to share your design with colleagues or
better yet people in your target audience. For example, let’s say you were
designing a resource site for a national realtor’s association. The people you
need to get feedback from concerning your navigation plans would be a local
realtor’s association or maybe even the realtor’s office that sold you your
house.

 

Another important key to
making a site that is easy to navigate is not building too many levels to your
site. Now that’s not to say you should organize your site on a single level, but
keeping the number of levels a visitor has to transcend is definitely a plus.
Obviously, the more content you add to a site, the more there becomes a need to
add additional levels. While adding multiple tiers to your site may be
inevitable, try to keep them to a minimum.

 

You should also always
try to make your sites searchable by adding a search engine. Many web design
packages like FrontPage and DreamWeaver have their own built in search engines
which can make the process very easy. If you are designing a database driven
site with something like ASP or PHP you will be in for a bit more work to add a
search engine. You will have to either write your own engine or possibly find
some shareware or free code. However you accomplish it, a search option will
become an invaluable tool on your websites.

 

Along the same line as a
search engine would be a site map. Site maps are also very useful tools for
visitors who are trying to find their way to a specific location on the site.
Like the site itself, the organization of your site map is also very important.
Generally, a site map will include almost all of the pages (if not all) on your
site and be organized in a fashion similar to the site itself.

 

Finally, in addition to
analyzing how your site will be organized you also need to consider how you will
display that organization. You actually have several different choices available
to you. One of the most popular choices today is the pop-out menu. Pop-out menus
such as are found on many major retail sites like Eddie Bauer and Best Buy are a
very effective way to hide and organize multiple levels of your web site. Other
more simple solutions could include the logical use of the hover buttons or
hyperlinks in a table.

 

In addition to the how
is the where. For the user’s convenience you might want to also consider having
links to the major sections of your sites on both the top and the bottom of each
page.

 

As a web designer, it is
your responsibility to make the user’s experience as easy and enjoyable as
possible. While most users will never really understand all of the thought and
effort that you put into improving their experience, it will keep them coming
back for more.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Quiz Goodies

When displaying data
from a database in ASP, there is often an issue with line breaks not displaying.

 

For example, let’s say
that you have a form that accepts comments that your visitors have on current
movies. Your visitors’ comments are often several paragraphs in length. When you
go to display their comments from your database using Response.Write, though,
the line breaks are lost and their comments display as a single paragraph.

 

How do you get around
this issue?

 

Read answer below.

Q & A Goodies


Questions are taken from
submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going
to
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/
.

 

 

Q.
I’m making a web page and my monitor is set to 1024×768, because I use that resolution when I am working making graphics. 

The thing I am having a problem with is when I use Adobe Go Live, to lay out a web page then I upload it, people running in different resolutions see the page in a way different from how I want them to.

I don’t want to have to change the resolution of the monitor, constantly switching from my preferred
settings to 800×600 for html coding, so is there some way I can embed resolution settings or some kind of viewing settings so that people will view the page the way I see it and intend for it to be viewed, no matter what
their resolution settings are?

For reference, here is the page in question that I am having problems with:

http://www.virage-entertainment.com/veblack.html

For me, with my monitor in its standard 1024×768 res, the page appears exactly how I want it to, with no horizontal scroll and
vertical scroll merely for looks. 

Is there some code or setting I can embed or put into my html so that this page will view this way no matter what a persons resolution is?

If not, is there a way for me to redo it so that the resolution settings won’t make a difference? Someone told me to render the page inside a frame/table that’s 800×600 I tried to make a table but couldn’t get rid of all the cells and rows.

 

A. The majority of people surfing the net today are viewing with a screen resolution of 800×600. (Although as history shows that it does change
over time – a few years back the standard was 640×480). I would suggest you focus on targeting the majority of
viewers. Although you don’t have to necessarily change your resolution, just keep in mind that when creating your tables and images they should be no wider than 780 pixels wide ( I usually make my tables no larger than 760 – but that is my personal preference). 

As far as resizing your site to 800×600 that should not be a problem. I noticed your entire front page consists of images. I would suggest getting rid and replacing the center image (the copy portion.. Virage Entertainment…etc.) with text – that would certainly free up some width space (and would help with search engine positioning if you decide to submit your site to the major search
engines).

P.S. You can use our own Bob Conley’s JavaScript browser resize trick – I use it all the time! 

In your browser’s address bar type: javascript:resizeTo(640,480)
Press your enter key and the screen will resize to 640×480
Save it to your favorite places.
Do the same with 800×600 and 1024×768 resolutions and save them to your favorite places. Now you can click on the link in your favorite place to resize your browser without having to change your settings. This way you can now view the site that you are creating in the
different settings and get an idea of the site layout.

 


*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by I
Aida
, one of our
Web Design
Mentors.

 

 

Q.
I am having a problem with the mailto tag. It is not sending the form text to my email.

<FORM METHOD=”POST” ACTION=mailto:emailname@domain.net ENCTYPE="text/plain">

I hope you might have a suggestion I have tried just about everything I can think of with no success.

 

A.  The version 6 browsers aren’t supporting e-mail forms. We recommend using a CGI script.

 

*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Eric Ferguson, one of our HTML Mentors.
 

 

Q.  I looked all over for a way to get the client’s
IP address to record the visit to my page but found nothing. Is there some way to get that with
HTML or CFML?

 

A.
It’s not possible in HTML to retrieve the
IP address. I don’t know CFML, you’ll have to research that if you want to use it. However you can retrieve it using
JavaScript, but I don’t know where you would store it.

Look at this: http://javascript.internet.com/user-details/ip-address.html

 

You
can also retrieve IP and browser information from most server technologies
such as ASP and PHP.

 


*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Communi
t
y. The answer was provided
by
Alex Newport
, one of our
HTML
Mentors.

News Goodies

Speaking of search engines, Inktomi
has just released an XML-based Search toolkit.


Click here to read the article

 

If you have been looking for some
code to quick start your PHP calendar, shopping cart or other common project
this might just be the resource you are looking for. 


Click here to read the article

 

Lycos is getting into the commercial
website business by offering hosting and other web tools and services.


Click here to read the article

 
 
Quiz Answer

The easiest way to
resolve this issue is to use the Replace function to replace all of the
carriage returns in each field that you are trying to print with the
<BR> HTML tag.

 

Here is how it works:

 

   
Response.Write(

   
Replace(RecordSet("ColumnName"),chr(10),"<BR>"))

 

This will take every
carriage return (chr(10)) and replace them with the <BR> HTML tag which
will allow your user’s comments to display just as they intended them.

 

*You can also us
vbcrlf in place of chr(10) is you are coding in vbscript or VB.



Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!



 


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