Weekly Workshop - Building an LOTR site part 2

[Simbelmyne]

Welcome again to another weekly workshop! This is the second part of the website workshop that was started 2 weeks ago. So, you've had your first few visitors to the site. So where do you go now?

Being a good webmaster

Being nice and friendly to your visitors is crucial, and keeping in touch with them is also vital. Here are some tips to be a good webmaster, and being a good webmaster improves your site.

1. Encourage your visitors to give feedback and correct your mistakes (I ask my visitors to do this and it makes broken links and grammatical or visual errors much easier to find). Put your email up, or, if you're worried about spam and privacy etc., get a form and make sure it works. Do a search for "Form to mail" and you'll get loads of results.

2. Listen to criticisms, it pays off. I got kinda annoyed when someone complained my white-on-blue was hard to read, but I changed to black on blue and didn't give them a hard time and it does work pretty well.

3. Get a guestbook or a tagboard to keep in touch with your visitors. I have both on Meduseld, guestbook from Bravenet and tagboard from www.tag-board.com.

4. Update your site as often as you can. I spend a lot of time updating Meduseld, or if I can't, I try to let people know I'm around. It doesn't have to be a whole new section, it can be a funny link or an announcement about how LOTR is doing in various charts. Be inventive!

5. Be as friendly as you can and if you're annoyed with people, don't show it.

Awards sites

One great way to get noticed is nominating your site for awards. Spend a bit of time improving, then go for it! Some of the best sites are:

Estelmire Awards
The Valar Awards
Land of Periannath
Starlit Seas Awards

Make sure you read the rules.

Listings

Listings are where you can get your site listed with others similar to it.Here are some good ones:

ULOTRWD
Visions of Far Lands
LOTR Fanatics Directory (Be prepared for a bad rating though...Meduseld got a 7/10, but I've seen cool sites get between 1-4 stars, which just goes to show.)

Charts

Most LOTR site charts are based on hits you get from their site or yours, plus the number of votes you get. They'll give you a link HTML code to get your visitors voting. Here are some good ones:

Tolkien Top 100
War of the Ring Top Sites List
TolkienWorld

That's all for today,

Simbelmyne

[Simbelmyne]

Day 2

Maintenance

A good site should be easy to maintain, so think about making your site as easy for you to use as possible.

Think about:

~ Your menu. I use frames (see part 1) so I only ever have to modify 1 document to change my menu. But if you have your menu typed into every single page, when you add a new section, you'll have to update every single page, which can take ages if your site grows.
~ The time you have. If you're snowed under with homework or work commitments, consider getting a friend to help you out or making things less work - e.g. less pages.
~ Your layout. If you need to make a complex table every time you add a new page, and you make lots, scrap it and make things simple. Using CSS (see part 1) can make the task easier when it comes to colours or just settling for a background colour (like much of Meduseld) can look as effective, with less work.
~ To save time with members asking questions, create an FAQ. One popular question on the boards is about the rank table - I started an FAQ, and it should work well.
~ Is your homepage easy to update?

Expanding

Everyone so often, you'll want to add something new to your site. Maybe something small, maybe something a bit larger. Here are some of the most common upgrades you can make to your site:

Item	Possible source	Maintenance	Remember...
Tagboard	www.tag-board.com	Low	Customise the settings and you're off!
Forums	www.proboards.com	Higher with each new member	Keep checking it and maybe get some mods
Guestbook	www.bravenet.com	Low	Keep checking it and maybe get email notification of new posts
Poll	Bravenet (link above)	Low	Announce results once in a while
E-cards	Bravenet (link above)	Low	Add new cards once in a while and keep a good range of cards

That's all for now. See you tomorrow

[Simbelmyne]

Day 3

Saving space

Ultimately, you'll find a time when your webspace runs out. Here a some ways to make the most of the space you have.

Compress images (jpg format) - open the image in Microsoft Photo Editor. Click File >> Save As. When the Save As box comes up, click the button "More". Then slide the slider that comes up to 75. This should decrease the size of your images significantly, but check it still retains enough quality for the correct task.

Don't host your own music and video - I host a bit of music on Meduseld, but the best way to do it is to place a hyperlink to the music you found in its original location, like you would do if the music was on your server. You should try and credit the site, or at least don't claim the music is from your site. You can't use the same principals with images.

No more background music - Background music increases the page size, and can be annoying too. I have music on my intro pages, but the intro is optional.

If it's big, get it hosted! - If you have a large image file, even after compression (or maybe it's a file that would lose a lot of quality if it were compressed), get it hosted by an image hosting company. Here are some:

www.uploadit.org
CyberTarp (10mb, galleries so you can find your file)

And you can find even more by searching "free image hosting".

Use CSS - rather than coding a complex layout, save time and space by coding CSS.

Zip your downloads - if you have a zipping/unzipping utility, zip up your download for quicker file transfers.

Use the same images on your pages - if you're tempted to make a different site logo for each page, don't! Using the same images saves you the time of making them, and the space they will take up.

And most of all...don't be afraid to break the rules! It's really a balance. I don't use CSS for all my pages, because I don't always need it. You know what's true for your site.

That's all for today,

Simbelmyne

[Simbelmyne]

Day 4

Being user-friendly and accessible

Every day, you will have many different people visit your site. Some will be on dial-up, some will be on a faster connection such as Broadband, and some will be wheezing along on 28k modems. You'll also have many different screen sizes coming along - 1024x768, 800x600, and many many more.

On top of this, some people may be on older or newer browsers, from IE to Opera to Netscape, some may be at different resolutions (16-bit, 8-bit, 24-bit...) and some people may be visually impaired or have a disability. Whoever visits your site, you should try and make it as easy for them to browse as possible. Here are some helpful hints.

With images, make sure you use alt tags. If you're using FPX (Frontpage Express), right-click on the image and select Image properties. Half-way down the box will be a field saying "Text". Type your alternative text in here. This will help people using a device that reads the page to them, and will kick in if your pics fail to load.

To help people on dial-up or lower modems, use fewer pics or pics with smaller file sizes. If you're doing a page of text, it needs a couple of related pics to brighten and break it up, but don't go crazy. This isn't really a rule when you're doing a gallery, but try creating small thumbnails and linking them to the big pictures so visitors can choose if they want to download 60kb of image.

Another way to help people on dial-up is to avoid large background music files or video intros. You can use MIDI files, but this can be annoying still.

As for screen sizes, don't make images bigger than 600x400. If you have a long image, you can go over the limit, but if you want an "enter" image (in the middle of your page) then keep to the restrictions.

As for cross-browser compatibility, test your site in different browsers or get some volunteers who can. It can be amazing how many changes you'll get from browser to browser.

Give these tips a go, and you're well on your way to making your site easy to view.

[Simbelmyne]

Day 5

Updates

So what do your visitors want to hear when you update? Movie news? Actor news? Just what's new on your site? A mix? You choose.

Try to keep your updates fairly short, but still informative - research them and give a link to the appropriate site (e.g. The Big Read news article on Meduseld has a link to the Big Read site). If you need to give pages of info, put it on a new page and if you have loads of updates, keep a news archive and only keep a few updates on the homepage at a time. I realised this when Meduseld had about forty updates on the homepage. Now I archive them, and it works very well.

Organisation

Meduseld is OK on organisation, but when your site gets really big, you'll have trouble organising it in a way people can find what they want easily. Here are some solutions:

~ A site map. Organise your site into four or so sections, make a table and categorise all your links.

~ Group things into larger sections rather than having lots of sections and sub-sections *cough* you hypocrite Simbelmyne *cough*

~ Link to EVERYTHING with your menu (Go here to find the menu type Meduseld has - it's very useful for me because I have loads of pages.)

I'm going to keep it short and sweet - go and enjoy Christmas!

x Simbelmyne