How To Make a Winning Site Tips

Reading these tips might help you set up a website that is ready to win the BTDesign Awards.

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Design

• Keep pages short - The first page looks better if it scrolls a maximum 2 screens vertically at 800 x 600 resolution, so don't put your entire site on a single page! Scrolling a page infinitely is boring and loading time can increase dramatically. You can keep longer pages for text-intensive pages but remember the word "short".
• Layout - Don't be obsessed with centering everything. Use tables in order to maximize the available space on the screen. If you want to optimize your site for a certain screen resolution 800x600 is better, most people use it nowadays. Avoid horizontal scrolling of pages.
• Text - Text paragraphs should be justified for an optimal result. Fonts like Arial and Verdana look better on screen also if used at small size, while Times would be hardly readable at "size=1". Remember not all your visitors have eagle's eyes. Too small fonts do oblige to approach the screen and shrink one's eyes. Never use a blue font on a black background or blue on red for obvious reasons. If the background color is dark you must use a lighter color for text though sometimes pure white does contrast too much with a dark background, so try and use another shade of white which looks more comfortable to the eyes.
• Tables - When using tables and setting their width and height attributes give preference to percentage values instead of fixed ones. Percentages permit to fit tables to every screen resolution. For example, if you set a table at "width=100% align=center" no matter which resolution your visitor uses the table will always be well and properly positioned on screen. If you use "width="800" instead, people using lower or higher resolutions might need to scroll horizontally to see the entire page or watch your page filling just half of the screen.
• Colors - Click here to try two very useful Javascripts you can use to check how the different colors on your page are matching (open in a new window).

Graphics

• The best way you can personalize your site is by making your own graphics. Though none of us was born a graphic designer learning how to make graphics is not difficult at all. There are many tutorials available and you can try and experiment just by opening your favorite image editor program, create a new image and let your artistic creativity express freely.
• Don't be afraid to add pages each presenting a single image and use thumbnails linked to larger images. You can also present larger images opening in a new smaller window.
• Optimize all graphics for a fast loading time but keep them looking good. It is very unpleasant to see poor quality and pixelized images of very nice subjects! There are many utilities that will shrink your jpg or gif files to the minimum without loosing quality.
• Don't use too large images which need scrolling for a total view - exception made for images you offer as wallpaper. If you absolutely need to use large images for layout purposes or splash screens try and slice them using an image editor or a dedicated program. Each slice will be inserted in a table and will load as a faster and smaller file.

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