17.1. Top of the Tips
The most important tip for even veteran authors is to surf the Web
for yourself. We can show and explain a few neat tricks to get you
started, but there are thousands of authors out there combining and
recombining HTML and XHTML tags and juggling content to create
compelling and useful documents.
Get copies of Netscape Navigator (the browser portion of
Communicator), Internet Explorer, and whatever other browser you feel
comfortable operating, and cruise. Collect web site URLs from
friends, business associates, and the traditional media. Even local
TV and radio stations have taken to announcing some of their
sponsors' web site URLs. And consult the many different web
directories like Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, and AltaVista for new and
up-to-date addresses for the web sites that suit your lifestyle or
business niche.
Examine (don't steal) their pages for eye-catching and
effective pages and use them to guide your own creations. Capture and
examine the source documents for the juicy bits. Get a feel of the
more effective web collections. How are their documents organized?
How large is each document? And so on.
We all learn from experience, so go get it.
17.1.1. Design for Your Audience
We continuously argue throughout the
book that content matters most, not look. That doesn't mean
presentation doesn't matter.
Effective documents match your target audience's expectations,
giving them a familiar environment in which to explore and gather
information. Serious academicians, for instance, expect a
journal-like appearance for a treatise on the physiology of the
kumquat: long on meaningful words, figures, and diagrams and short on
frivolous trappings like cute bullets and font abuse. Don't
insult the reader's eye, except when exercising artistic
license to jar or in order to attack your reader's
sensibilities.
By anticipating your audience and designing your documents to appeal
to their tastes, you also subtly deflect unwanted surfers from your
pages. Undesirables, such as penniless college students surfing your
commercial site[86], may hog your server's resources
and prevent the buying audience you desire from ready access to your
pages.
You can use subtle colors and muted text transitions between sections
for a classical art museum's collection to mimic the hushed
environment of a real classical art museum. The typical
rock-'n'-roll crazed web surfer maniac probably
won't take more than a glance at your site, but the millionaire
arts patron might.
Also, use effective layout to gently guide your readers' eyes
to areas of interest in your documents. Do that by adhering to the
basic rules of document layout and design, such as placing figures
and diagrams nearby -- if not inline -- with their content
reference. Nothing's worse than having to scroll up and down
the browser window in a desperate search for a picture that can
explain everything.
We won't lie and suggest that we're design experts. We
aren't, but they're not hard to find. So, another tip for
the serious web page author: seek professional help. The best
situation is to have design experience yourself. Next best is to have
a pro looking over your shoulder, or at least somewhere within
earshot.
Make a trip to your local library and do some reading on your own,
too. Even better yet, browse the various online guides. Check out
Web Design in a Nutshell, Second Edition (O'Reilly &
Associates). Your readers will be glad you did. Section 1.7, "Tools for the Web Designer"
17.1.2. Boilerplate Documents
The next best tip we can give you is
to reuse your documents. Don't start from scratch each time.
Rather, develop a consistent framework, even to the point of a
content outline into which you add the detail and character for each
page. You might even endeavor to create style sheets, so that the
look and feel of your documents remain consistent.
Here's our contribution to help start your boilerplate document
collection. The following sources contain what the HTML and the XHTML
standards currently tell us is the minimum content that should appear
in every respective document (regardless of what the browsers might
let you get away with) and then some added for document clarity. Use
them as skeletons for your own documents (they look mighty alike):
<html>
<head>
<title>Required; replace this title with your own</title>
</head>
<body>
<h3>Reiterate the title here</h3>
...Insert your document's contents here...
<address>Include your name and contact information
usually at the end of the document
</address>
</body>
</html>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
" http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Every XHTML document needs a title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h3>Reiterate the title here</h3>
...Insert your document's contents here...
<address>Include your name and contact information
usually at the end of the document
</address>
</body>
</html>
