Once I have designed and built a web site .. is that it?
No. Unless your web site is deliberately short lived, you should keep it updated and up to date.
The site's design and appearance should be varied occasionally to give returning visitors a sense of change and freshness.
Content should be modified from time to time to ensure that visitors do not see the same old stuff they saw when they last visited the site.
In one sense you never finish a site. You can have rest periods but you should be working on the site for as long as it is attracting returning visitors.
Should I use frames?
Frames became fashionable as a way of allowing certain content to stay put on the screen while other content changed. The obvious use of a frame is to provide a static navigation window. Frames however posed certain disadvantages - they made it difficult (if not impossible) to bookmark pages because the URL of specific pages was not visible to the browser. In large sites this was a nuisance. There were problems with printing out pages.
Later generations of browsers overcame these difficulties to some extent. Tables and then Cascading Styles Sheets to a large extent replaced frames as a way of managing content.
To some extent it is a matter of taste or approach to site design whether or not to use frames. Some sites offer no-frames versions to that the visitor can choose which type to enter.
Web designers should think carefully about their approach to structuring and managing a site and not rush blindly into one method or another. The use of framed sites should be restricted to circumstances where no other method achieves better results.
If I don't want a page any more, should I just delete it?
No. If you have submitted your site to search engines, it is possible that they have indexed both the home page and a variety of other pages that are linked to it. Search engines might then continue to list pages that you have deleted. This lowers the rate of hits into your site.
If you no longer need a page, remove the content and insert a statement like "This page is no longer needed" and then give visitors a link to your home page or another appropriate page. Remember also that people might have book marked that page - if they get a broken link they might not bother to look at your site again.
How do I get my web site
into search engines?
Some search engines will
allow you to submit your web site address
to them free of charge. They do however
guarantee to index your site and they give
no guarantees as to how long this will
take.
Major search engines
include Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Alta
Vista. If you want to check which are the
most popular search engines, go to Search
Engine Watch - which is the most authoritative
web site on the Internet for this subject.
Once you have decided
which are your most important search engines,
you then have to hunt for the "add URL"
page. Sorry, but these are often well hidden!
Last time I looked (June 2005), Google
had a
page giving instructions on how to
submit your web address.
I recommend that you also add your web
address to the Open
Directory Project because
this feeds addresses into most of the major
search engines.
How can I make my web
site secure?
Firstly, decide what
the threats are. In what way would your
web site be insecure? Is it likely that
hackers would want to target your web site?
Some of the threats are
more to do with email than with web pages.
Many businesses receive unsolicited emails
(spam) and find this a nuisance. One way
of avoiding spam is not to give the world
your most used and busy email addresses.
In order to avoid spamming,
I recommend that the mailto link is never
used. There are better and more secure
ways of allowing people to send you messages
than to put your email address into a web
page.
If you subscribe to a
forum or other web siet where you email
address is going to onview to the public,
set up a special email address solely for
this purpose. Use a web mail account to
set up an email address that you can use
in forums and publically available web
sites.
When designing your web
site respect other people's security. If
you ask people for their email address,
name or other person details, write a privacy
statement. Say what you will do to meet
privacy requirements. Add a link to this
privacy statement near to the point where
people would submit their details.
