Web Programming

We’re entering an exciting period in the history of the Web. Since the 90’s, the Internet has embedded itself in our lives in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Web programming is the best way to get our foot in the door. A programmer with little experience can produce a useful web application in a matter of hours. Not just playful or interesting, but something that can actually go into productive and live use. The only other environment where that is possible is the command line — and managers never see programmers’ command line tools.

Web programming is also a kind of universal need. Sure, there are lots of things besides the web. But unless you really try to avoid the web, as a programmer you are likely to have occasional problems that are best solved with a web application. This is true no matter what field you are in. In part because web applications don’t just touch on core needs — e. g. , embedded programming at a hardware company, numerical analysis at an engineering firm — but on any coordination needs, and everyone needs to coordinate things.

Some Easy Ways to improve your Website’s Legibility:

· Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go – use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler.

· Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it’s never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn’t have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.

· The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there’s not enough contrast.

· Don’t stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I’ll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.

· Making your website’s content more legible is easy. It doesn’t take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that’s more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors.

· And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates more on a web page than spelling errors – it simply makes you look like you don’t care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spell-check tool.

In fact, if yours is a website that sells website design services, that is, you want people to pay you to design their website; it is in your interest not to make your site too plain. Many potential customers see your site as an example of what their site can become. There’s no point claiming “Content is King” at this time – they won’t be around long enough to hear your claim. Such sites need a certain amount of color, graphics, etc, although of course making it take too long to load would also be a deterrent to your potential clients.

Like all things, how you design your site depends on your topic and your target audience. Keep that cardinal rule in mind and you’ll be fine. Decorative graphics on a page are fine. They make a page more pleasant to look at, and hence more likely to be read. But you should at least make them as small as possible. While I’m hesitant to give a hard and fast rule about how big such graphics should be, a decorative graphic that is a few hundred kilobytes in size is definitely too big to be tolerated.

Once you start to understand how to make web pages, you will be tempted to go all out with animated gifs, rollover affects, and fancy designs. The problem with this is that it can easily lead to confusing pages for the viewer and hard to maintain sites for you. Web sites are always in need of changing and updating. You will be thankful when that inevitable day comes and you have an easy to update modular site to work with instead of an inflexible over-designed mess.