Home Page Hints

It's your 'cyberhome', but remember that websites are different from books or magazines. Think about these suggestions to make people want to stay.

1. Use a navigation bar to organise your hyperlinks to other pages.

2. Hyperlinks also let visitors navigate up or down long pages.

3. Keep your use of colour and buttons consistent. If a Next Pade button is a pink circle, all Next Page buttons should be the same, and in the same place on the screen.

4. If you use a lot of animations, your Web page will take a long time to download.

5. If you use a lot of graphics, animations and text your Web page will be too busy.

6. It's difficult to read a text that's next to an animation.

7. Keep texts short and simple! Surfers don't like reading on a computer screen much.

8. It's not easy to read multi-coloured text.

9. Lots of bright colours look nice at first, but often give people headaches!

10. Make sure you use a spell check and use good grammar.

11. Try not to use too much slang. People who visit your site may not understand.

12. Don't be afraid to be original. Good websites have something that is different about them and that comes from you!

Task 7. Discuss the following questions.

1. How would you design your personal website?

2. What graphics, images and colours would you use?

3. What would you say in your text?

4. How many pages would you have?

5. What would you call the links on your navigation bar to show the different pages?

Task 8. Match the words and phrases in the text with the definitions (1-7).

1. connections to a Web page or part of a Web page___________________________________

2. make or produce_______________________________________________________

3. plan or build a Web page________________________________________________

4. a group of organized Web links, usually in a line ______________________

5. does not change, always the same_________________________________________

6. the type of software that helps create Web pages_____________________________

7. new, not done before____________________________________________________

Task 9. Complete the sentences (1-8) with the words in the box.

busy consistent generate home pages structure

surfers upload Web-authoring

1. That Web page is much too _________________. I don’t know what to look at.

2. An FTP server is a computer that lets you ______________ files to the Internet.

3. The buttons on this page are not ____________ with the button on the last page.

4. Net never like reading a lot of text on the screen.

5. ____________ software means you don't have to learn HTML to make a Web page.

6. Many students have their own _______________________on the World Wide Web.

7. HTML creates the ___________________ for Web pages to run on a browser.

8. Web-authoring programs __________________HTML tags for you.

Task 10. Do you know how to design a website? What do people or companies need websites for?