One thing any web design guru worth his salt will tell you is that when designing a site, it pays to think big. This comes naturally to some people, but many of us are used to putting down our achievements as much as we can.
When putting together a site, it’s very easy to forget that once all the pieces have been put in place and the site has been uploaded to the web, if the content is good enough and hits the right nerve, then there’s a good chance that you could attract many more visitors than you originally imagined.
However, all this extra popularity comes at a price. When a large number of visitors come to your site, things can quickly start to grind to a halt. Bandwidth can be throttled, overused services can be clogged, access times can skyrocket, and at the end of it all, there’s a real chance your site will bite the digital dust and refuse to load. Which, as we all know, is definitely not a good thing.
When sites go down, one thing is sure to happen: people will be discouraged from visiting them en masse. Once your loyal customers are upset, you can guarantee that your email inbox will start to fill with angry and critical emails, which is enough to dent the confidence of even the most hardcore Flash fiddler. So what can you do? Well, quite a lot, as a result.
Make your site universal
Before we start talking about what you can do to speed things up and make sure your site doesn’t buckle under the pressure of a large influx of visitors, let’s take a look at some of the things that can help bring people online. first place. .
Perhaps the most obvious principle to keep in mind is that the fastest way to get visitors is to make your site as welcoming as possible. We’re not talking about a nice introductory paragraph on your home page, but rather pointing out that the site needs to be able to attract visitors using a wide range of browsers. There’s no use getting 400,000 hits a day if only a third of that number can get in and use the thing. There is nothing more annoying to a web bettor than a big message that the page you are trying to view cannot be displayed in your browser, even if you are using a beta version of the latest Netscape clone.
To combat this, it makes sense to make sure you’re not building your site from scratch with a single user in mind. Not everyone on the web uses Internet Explorer to browse the web, so if the site can’t be viewed in that browser, you’re neglecting a lot of people. In addition to all the different browsers available, it’s also worth noting that many people don’t want to update their browser software and therefore may be using the same older version that came with their copy of Windows 95.
To this end, any funky IE version 6+ features you employ will be totally lost to these users, and may even prevent the site from loading.
This, as everyone will tell you, is not good for business. Don’t be tempted to fill your pages with lots and lots of javaScript or other advanced code that can cause older or less advanced browsers to crash. Instead, opt for a more functional interface to facilitate the widest demographic possible. It is also obvious that you should try
your design in a variety of browsers at every stage of the process, to make sure everything is as cross-platform as possible. Don’t just test things last, as it can take a lot of work to fix a mistake that was made early in the build.
Finally, it’s also not a good idea to paste a lot of nested tables into your layout. These are notorious for slowing down access times for many users, and again those using older software may have trouble seeing them. Instead, try to counter this by using cascading style sheets (any web designer worth their salt should be doing this by default now). These are a universal method of controlling design issues, such as fonts and visual text layouts, and go a long way toward ensuring that each site visitor sees the site as they intended, with very few compatibility issues. It also means you have to write less code, which we think you’ll agree makes the lead instantly engaging.
update regularly
But no matter how usable the site is, the most important thing to remember if you want to maintain that hit count is that you must update the content on the site regularly. While visitors may flock to your new site, all singing and dancing by the thousands when it first loads onto the web, once they’ve read every word and seen every image, they’ll want more. And you have to provide it, or else these demanding people will take your business elsewhere, and your hit counter will stall in an embarrassing and unrewarding way.
Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to continue supplying new material for your consumers. The best and most popular sites take supply and demand very seriously, with portals like BBCi, news provider Sky News and even your typical ISP home page rushing to update their content countless times a day to keep it as up-to-date and attractive as possible. .
Of course, this can be a daunting prospect if you have to code each and every update yourself, but fortunately this task can be made much easier if you move your site to a server-based database. This way you can quickly track new material to the relevant pages almost automatically, without having to waste time coding new objects and images into the layout. It also gives you a lot more time to create original content in the first place, so it’s a win-win situation.
But if you don’t feel like transporting things to a database, you can achieve similar results by using a content management system. These are most often used by large sites that need to process large volumes of material, but that doesn’t mean you have to be mega-rich to use one. In fact, smaller bettors may want to check out the OpenCMS Project, which provides users with a free CMS license built around Bohemian open source code. It’s well worth a look and can save you a great deal of time and effort, not to mention cash.
Rationalization
If you start updating your site regularly through one of these more automated options, a side effect that will quickly become apparent is that it’s best to keep page sizes to a minimum. There’s no point in spending years updating reams of information on a single page on a large site, because the chances of people actually noticing it are pretty slim. So one trick is to keep the material small but abundant.
But this does not mean that the only benefits to be gained are in terms of time savings. In fact, smaller pages are one of the best ways to ensure your bandwidth and access times stay consistently high. Remember all those people lining up to access your site? Well, keep the page size to a minimum, and the time it takes for each user to load a page will be reduced accordingly, which immediately gets things flowing. Simply put, the more compact your code is, the faster it can be delivered to your customers.
Along with this, it also makes sense to keep other content such as images and videos as small as possible. Never forget that a lot of surfers aren’t experiencing the delights of broadband, and these folks won’t appreciate it if you make them wait five minutes to download a large image or QuickTime movie. So bring those images down to screen resolution (72 ppi) and compress them as much as possible in JPEG mode to keep display times fast. Also, don’t forget to cut larger images into slices to improve transfer speed.
When all is said and done, the most important thing to remember is that the smaller your site is, the faster it will respond. Fast sites are a favorite of all web surfers and can also be updated much faster and easier on the production side. Finally, small, nimble sites are much less likely to fall apart when seeing a horde of concurrent users, which brings us back to square one. Only this time, instead of thinking big, the best design principles may come from thinking small.