------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homepage Suggestions... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following are hints and suggestions I make about peoples home pages as required. For a full list of suggestions I mail to people about home pages look at https://antofthy.gitlab.io/info/www/homepage.txt An alturnative page of things NOT to do is http://earthspace.net/~esr/html-hell.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- General Permissions... Make directories world accessable, and files world readable... find ~/public_html -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 0644 find ~/public_html -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 0755 For SELinux you may need to tag files... ls -FlaZ # list selinux context tags chcon -t httpd_sys_content_t file # set tag on file/directory chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t directory # recursivally System... httpd_sys_content_t # readable httpd_sys_rw_content_t # readable and writable httpd_sys_script_exec_t # executable CGI script # requires 'httpd_enable_cgi' boolean (def: on) httpd_sys_ra_content_t # appendable by script_exec CGI scripts User, if home directories are enabled... httpd_content_t # readable httpd_rw_content_t # readable and writable httpd_script_exec_t # CGI script ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Research Results... A book/report called "Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide" reports on some research done by seeing how well people navigate around the web. Findings include: - Color is really only useful to indicate a visited link. EG: Multi-Colored text is just difficult to read. and to figure out where users have been. - Animation may be good in ads, and look cool, but otherwise it just irritates users and makes pages difficult to follow. - "Frames" help only if designed well. EG: It is only usful in indexing libraries and books, not for general use. More research results at http://www.uie.com (Source: HTML Writers Guild Mailing Lists) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sign all Pages You should add a Email Address part to the bottom of all pages which contain as a minimum... Creation Date, Last Major Change Date, and who to contact for Errors. That last is most important. It should consist of your name and your email address. The mail address being links with a "mailto:" link or to your "send mail form". I have found that if you do not provide at least a "errors link" people will just NOT report errors and problems to you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homepage of Links (Yuck!) Do not just create a homepage of links. Everyone does this and it is very boring. Make a separate page for such 'hotlists' and maybe make this page the default start page for your WWW client as only you would be the major user of such a pages. Devote your actual homepage to information about you, your interests and especially any information you wish to give to world. Make your hotlist a clearly marked sub-page, if you want it public. Example: My hotlist is available to people who want it, but is NOT listed directly on my homepage. It is however the first page my web browser loads so I can jump to the places I go to all the time easily. HomePage (My Home is my Castle!) http://www.ict.gu.edu.au/anthony/ Hotlist http://www.ict.gu.edu.au/anthony/hotlist.html Personal Information http://www.ict.gu.edu.au/anthony/anthony.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using "Click here" all over the place Using the words "Click HERE" is bad, repeative and treats the viewer as if they are dumb. If the user has reached your pages then obviously he knows what to do with web links. Also what if the user is using a text only web browser! Then he will not be using a graphical pointer (mouse) and as such "click here" is not even correct. Also who is to say that sometime in the near future some other selection mechnisim will not be available! then your "click here" should probably read "look here" or "point here" or even "pull this", or even all of them! Who knows how we would be using computers in the years to come. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bad Colors (Also see research results above) (Link Colors -- From Sun's Style Guide) The convention that's evolved among creators and users of web browsers is that links that have not yet been followed use a brighter or higher luminance color than those that have already been traversed. (For many browsers, they're shown in shades of purple or blue) When you change the link colors (LINK and VLINK options to the BODY tag), you can easily reverse this brightness mapping, or worse, choose colors that read at the same level of brightness. Don't do it. The problem is that changing link colors makes it difficult to tell where people have been, which is difficult enough as it is. You are just making it easier to get lost. (Visited Link color is red!) When the mosaic web browser was released, had the convention of using Blue for Links and a Darkish Red for visited links. This scheme was also use by the later developers of netscape and all other web clients. As such people expect that dark red links means `visited' as such red should not be used at the normal `unvisited link' color. I suggest you try to keep reasonally close to blue, unvisited and dark red for visited link colors) (Link Color and Visited Color is the same) This is bad as the web user has know way of telling if thay have previously visited the page the link refered to or not. This is very very very annoying. If this happens a lot on a site, the visitor may dispare of finding any other unread information very quickly and leave. The only exception to this is to `hide' information. For example in web adventures such as my own "Castle Adventure" a maze becomes fairly easy to explore if and when links are colored differently if you have visited the `node'. Such cases of information hiding is the only time I would think that the visited color matches the link color. (Too colorful a background) Your Home page text is very difficult to read -- please change or at least reduce the range of colors used in your background to something distant from your text and link colors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Underline text which are not links... Do not underline non link text, particularly if it is not the same color as the documents normal text color (whatever that is). Such underlined text is far too easilly mistaken as a link users can select or click for more information. It just confuses people. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Saying the Obvious in titles and headings... Don't bother labeling your main top level page as just "Home Page". It looks silly and make it appear that you think your readers are dumb. The title or graphics of the page should make it clear if this is a home page or a sub-page of your site. Instead just title your top level page as normal or add extra graphics or other fanciness. For subpages, use a simpler title about what that page is about, and include a plain simple link to "return to top/main/home page" somewhere near the top. This makes the difference obvious enough. That return link can be repeated near the bottom of a page for convenance, if the page is more than one or two screen fulls long. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Header Tag Miss-use DO NOT mis-use the header tags (Eg;
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, etc...
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Check your HTML
Get the perl script "WebLint" which will find and report bad html.
http://www.khoral.com/staff/neilb/weblint.html
ftp://ftp.khoral.com/pub/weblint/
Sites are also available which you can ask it to download and check a
specific URL like your homepage and report problems.
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