Webucation - A Guide to Websites and the Internet

A browser is the window through which you view a website. Historically people have mostly used Internet Explorer, but now Safari, Chrome and Firefox are also common. A browser processes HTML code, and translates it into stylised text and images that you see on your screen.

Older browsers are notoriously poor and inconsistent in the way they display websites. For more information, see our page on supported browsers.

Branding is very important to a lot of companies, and it is a natural desire to want to reflect branding on a website by using a company font throughout. The problem is that there are only a handful of “websafe fonts”.

Using a websafe font means that no matter which computer you are on you can open a website and the font will appear as it was designed. If you don’t use a websafe font, when a user opens a website and they don’t have that particular font (which 95% of users won’t), it will revert to a default websafe font, which may upset the layout of your text.

If it is vital to you to use a company font which is not websafe, you can make the text an image instead of code-driven text. However, this is also problematic for a couple of reasons:

• Content Management Systems (which allow you to update content yourself) can only change code-driven text, but to change content that is an image you will need a designer to recreate this image every time, and have a developer upload it for you.
• Images are not readable by Search Engines, so if you want your content to be read by Google, and improve your ranking, your text needs to be written into the code, rather than an image. (Download the Webucation Guide for more information on SEO).

So it is basically a compromise that all companies need to consider. Is it more important for your site to be branded, or easily updated and readable by Google?

Computers have many screen sizes, which means that the appearance of a web page will alter from computer to computer. Rather than shrinking or magnifying the image to fill a larger screen, the main content area of a website will remain the same, with the border space extending to fill the rest of the screen.

Most websites will be designed so that you can see all the important information above “the fold” (without having to scroll) on a laptop screen. You should be aware that if you view your site on a big screen, like a those big screens Mac designers use, you will see a lot more of the background image, and the main box containing your actual website will stay the same size as if you were viewing it on a laptop.

It sounds obvious, but usability is probably the most important thing about a site - aside from actually getting users to go to it. Creating a useable website means that your site should be simple for your users to navigate, and effective at conveying your message and achieving your business goals (be they to get new customers to contact you, buy products etc).

The main question you should ask yourself when looking at a webpage is “Will the user ask themselves any questions?” For example, Do they know what your site is about within 3 seconds of looking at it? Will they wonder where to go to get the information they want? Will they be confused about the meaning of page titles? The aim is to try and ensure your user asks themselves as few questions as possible. They should take one look at the page and know where to go to find what they want.

Although it is tempting to make literary or interesting page titles and links (ie. “Want to Find Something?” instead of “Search”, or “Who We Are” instead of “About Us”) it is best practice on the net to use standard phrases, and design concepts. Always putting Contact Us at the right hand end of the navigation, putting the main navigation across the top of the page (under the header), and putting the main contact details in the footer (so it is easily found on every page) are examples of this. There is a lot more to usability than this, and your web company will be experts in it, but this is a good starting point.