ITEC 745 - Course Best Practices

Best Practice	Description

Proper Titles <title> tip	Proper Titles are required for all pages on your sites. Titles should let users know where they are in your site. An example is "About Me - Andrew Roderick, ITEC 745".
Proper File Naming more info	no spaces: did you not includes spaces in your names, using underlines_to represent spaces instead. avoid caps: did you not include initial capital letters, attempting to keep names all lower case? no special characters: did you not use special characters in your names? consistency: whatever you did right or wrong, did it follow a consistency.
Alt Tags for Images < img src ="x.gif" alt="pic"> tip	Required for all <img> tags in your site. Alternative Text (<alt>) shows up either before an image loads or (depending upon browser) when your mouse cursor sits over an image. More importantly, it is an important function for accessibility for text-only and speech-based browsers, largely used by disabled persons. More Info
Consistent Sitewide Navigation	All websites should contain some kind of common navigation that is consistent and recurs on each page. While there are exceptions to this based on variations of structure, the idea is that a user should be able to traverse the major levels of your website from each page and the mechanism for allowing this should be the same so users only have to learn it once. When creating navigation, include the home page and then other top-level pages on your site. You should never NOT link to the currently selected page (however one exception to this rule is when you embed your common navigation in a template and don't wish to recreate it on every page).
No "Dancing Bears"	The "dancing bear" concept will come up throughout the course and refers to the indiscriminate use of graphics, animations (flash) or other technology. This is driven by using technology for its own sake or to promote the "cool" factor. The corolloary to this is the "my dog" picture although I've heard many good excuses for including that on a homepage. Remember, leave "cool" to the undergrads, we're concerned about making websites that are useful for a defined set of users.
Download Time / Bandwidth	In general, the page should take no more than 10 seconds to load for the average user. On general websites, 56k modem users must be accounted for. Dreamweaver provides an indicator in the bottom-right corner of the design window of how many seconds it will take a page to load. To adjust the bandwidth speed this is set to, go to "Edit" > "Preferences" and select the "Status Bar" category. There you can adjust the "Connection Speed" used to calculate the download time.
Page Real Estate/Page Sizing	Set up web pages so that critical items display in the 800 x 600 pixel zone.
Content Accuracy	Ensure that content including titles, headings and body text do not contain spelling or grammatical errors. Ensure content is accurate and factual (and cite sources when appropriate). Use consistent language (for instance, if you refer to the term "dog", don't later use the term "canine").
Valid XHTML Pages	All pages in your website should be validated XHTML pages (transitional).