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Your Domain Name
You can look up Domain Names at Network Solutions or Register.com to see
if the name you want is available.
When you register a domain name, you can "park" it with
the registration company until you arrange hosting for the name. The
hosting setup amounts to telling the world where they can find your
domain on the Internet. Many people prefer to leave the technical details
of registration to the ISP who hosts their domain or the web developer
who sets up their web site.
The one area of domain registration where your attention
is crucial is the Contact Information. Three contacts are required
for registration: Administrative Contact (who owns the name), Technical
Contact (who hosts the name), and Billing Contact (who pays for the
name).
We see many domains in which the web developer has set
up a domain for a client with the web developer listed as the Administrative
Contact for the domain. This means that the web developer and NOT
the client "owns" the domain. This situation often becomes a problem
when the web developer and client part company.
If you have already have a domain, you can look
up your contact information using whois. If you discover that you are not the Administrative
Contact you should attempt to remedy that problem while you are still
on good terms with the domain owner!
Details frequently
forgotten in website design:
- Bandwidth
- For most of the world, the Internet is accessed over
a 56k or less connection. For all the broadband hype, this is likely
to be the case for quite some time. If your page can't load in less
than 30 seconds it will probably will not be viewed.
- Maintainability
- If you are planning on incorporating timely information
into your site, make sure you understand the commitment required to
keep up to date. Not keeping your site timely erodes your credibility
and wastes your visitors' time. The web does not need more out-of-date
information!
- Bells and Whistles
- There are several hundred different browser versions
out there - each with its own quirks and bugs. If you want to reach
the widest audience, you must be careful how features requiring advanced
browser support are used in your design. For example, security-conscious
browsers can turn off both Java and javascript - if your navigation
system requires javascript, you have locked these people out of your
site.
- Accessibility
- It is astounding that so little attention is paid
to making the web accessible to people with disabilities. Browser
variations muddy this issue but, for a good look at usability issue,
visit the Center for Applied Special Technology page validator, Bobby. Go ahead,
run some of your favorite pages through Bobby and see how poorly most
do. Validate our pages and you will see we need to work harder at
accessibility, too. As usual, the specifications for accessibility
at w3.org far exceed current browser capabilities,
and we hope to improve our own work as browser CSS and HTML4 support
improves.
The Care and Feeding
of your Web Site
- Assessing Your Web Site
- To determine how your web site is performing,
you should learn to read and understand the traffic information provided
by your hosting provider. This information may take many forms, periodic
reports sent as e-mail, graphical or tabular on-line, reports, or
even raw server log files. Things to look for in the report:
- Pages are what carry the content. If your you
don't see many pages listed (.htm or .html) among your top 20
hit list your site is graphics heavy (.jpg or .gif) and ineffective
at delivering content.
- External links directly to your images. Look
for image hit counts which exceed the hit count of the page containing
the image.
- Errors in external or internal links. If your
report provides counts of status codes, the totals for 400 and
500 codes should be less than 1% of your traffic. Otherwise, you
site is appearing broken to a lot of visitors and you should find
out why.
- Problems in your hosting environment. Unexpected
fluctuations in traffic or error counts can indicate that something
is happening in your hosting environment.
- Stay Involved
- Look at your site and check out those of your competitors.
If possible, try out a few different access points - a friend's AOL
account or your local library, for example. The point of this exercise
is to see how your web site performs under a variety of conditions.
The experience is not uniform!
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For a free 1-hour consultation,
please contact us at info@issiweb.com
(902) 529-2479
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