Kokul’s World

Over the past few months, I have gotten active in web site design, particularly for the websites about my home village of Idaikkadu in Sri Lanka. After several emails being sent without a response, and a lack of motivation from the admins to even change their sites, I’ve decided to write a little guide that hopefully they will read, and hopefully others will read, so people don’t make mistakes in their web designs.

1. Do not use frames!!!!
   Frames were all good and fine back when the World Wide Web was still young. However now, it is the worst thing you can do to your website. Why? Well simply because Googlebot, and various other spider bots for other search engines cannot read frames. So what happens is that your site doesn’t get indexed, and you don’t appear on any search engine. Also, frames are really a shortcut, and it really doesn’t make you look too professional as a web designer.
2. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for your page design
   Seriously don’t limit yourself with HTML. It is fine for text markup, but really falls short in terms of site layout and images. CSS was designed specifically to be flexible, powerful, and simple to use, so that one can design a web site of virtually any layout without hassles. It is not hard to learn, it still uses the same element names as those used in HTML. The most you will be spending is 15-30 minutes learning it. Also, you can just import the same CSS style sheet into every web page. This reduces the time spent per page, keeps your site looking uniform, and makes it easier to make changes to your site layout, since the entire site’s layout is controlled by just one file. CSS offers far more options than HTML in terms of design options, so please use it!
3. Do not use tables for site layout!
   Another big mistake is to use tables instead of CSS for site design. While it works, tables were originally used to organize text. So if you have some text that is easier to understand in a table, then use a table. But don’t use it for site layout. Tables aren’t designed for such purposes, and thus, they are not flexible. You have a much harder time designing a site using tables than using CSS.  One rule of thumb I use for where tables are necessary is to type out your content in Microsoft Word or some other text editor. Wherever you feel that tables are needed for content purposes, that is where you place the tables!
4. Make sure you are using valid HTML and CSS.
   This is one of the most important steps. If you want your website to look the same with no glitches and problems in ALL web browsers and operating systems, you better make sure you have valid HTML and CSS that follows the W3 Consortium’s guidelines. You can always check if your HTML and CSS is valid by using their free validation service, which highlights the line and specifies what is wrong with it.
   HTML Validation Service: http://validator.w3.org/
   CSS Validation Service: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Hopefully this guide has been useful to all you web designers out there. By following the steps above, you can make sure the Internet is a more inter-compatible, and better place.