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Under Construction
Unix Commands
For those of you who use unix-based servers for your websites and need to know how
to navigate your way around a unix filesystem, here's a great cheatsheet for you:
Common Unix Commands For Webmasters
Index Pages
The "index" or "home" page of your website is the very first page that you want visitors to see when they
visit your site. Most web servers recognize one of the following filenames as default "home" pages:
index.html, index.htm, home.html, home.htm, default.html or default.htm. However, index.html is the most
common one of these. By "default", we mean that if someone types http://www.alphagam.net/webdesign/
instead of http://www.alphagam.net/webdesign/index.html, the web server will automatically know that the
index.html file is intended.
When starting a new site, you should always consider using index.html as your homepage, rather than agd.html,
yourchapter.html, mypage.html, etc. This is because if you don't have an index.html file and the web server
is configured a certain way, people will be able to see the contents of your directory.
We set up an example of this that you can try. The homepage for the website is example1.html and the homepage
URL is http://www.alphagam.net/webdesign/example1/example1.html.
Now try going to just http://www.alphagam.net/webdesign/example1/
and you'll see that instead of showing the homepage, you see the contents of the directory: example1.html,
test.html and test2.html. The pages test.html and test2.html are intended to be pages that we don't want
visitors to see yet. If our homepage was index.html instead of example1.html, these pages wouldn't be seen.
This isn't necessarily a security problem, but it's not very good webdesign practice. You may have test pages
on your site that you're not ready for people to see yet, like in our example above. Omitting the default
homepage would allow people to easily see those pages.
Webmaster Contact Information
We strongly suggest that your website include contact information for the webmaster. This information is
helpful for when someone notices a problem with your site and wants to report it. Of course it also
allows people to give you positive feedback on the site. :-)
The webmaster contact information can go at the bottom of your index page, or even in comments in the HTML
source. Another thing you can do is provide a feedback form, using a CGI or Javascript program.
Verify Your Updates
Whenever you make changes to your site, you should ALWAYS load the changed pages in your web browser to
make sure they look the way you want them to. Don't rely on your webpage generator to show you a
completely accurate representation of your pages. It's possible that it can sometimes interpret the HTML
differently than your web browser will. Also, you should always view your pages in both Netscape and
Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE). See the next section for more detailed information.
Netscape vs. Internet Explorer
As mentioned above, you should always view your website in both Netscape and MSIE. These are the two most
popular web browsers used and they are used almost equally. So you should make sure that your site looks
good regardless of which browser your visitor is using.
It's important to know that not all HTML will work with both Netscape and MSIE. There are some HTML
features that were developed by Netscape that MSIE doesn't support and there are some features that were
developed by Microsoft that Netscape doesn't support. As an example, MSIE supports the MARQUEE tag
that allows you to have text scrolling across your screen. Netscape does not support this tag and will
instead show non-moving text. There's a great site called the HTML Compendium that has information about every HTML tag in existance and shows
which browsers support each one.
It's also important to know that Netscape tends to be a lot more picky about your HTML being accurate
than MSIE is. This means that if you have an error in your HTML, it may show up in Netscape, but not
in MSIE. For example, on one chapter website, when the index page was viewed in Netscape, it showed
only a link to a disclaimer page. However, when viewed in MSIE, the entire page, with images and all,
showed up properly and the disclaimer link was where the author meant it to be - at the bottom. After
looking at the actual source code, it was discovered that the closing TABLE tag on the page was missing
the /. This caused Netscape to not display the table at all, while MSIE figured out that it was supposed
to be a closing tag and displayed the page properly. Netscape appears to be particularly picky with
tables and frames, so if you have either of those on your site, please take our suggestion and make sure
you check out your site with both browsers!
Decreasing Your Site's Load Time
There are several different ways you can help decrease your site's load time. Some of the time it
takes to load webpages is the browser trying to figure out exactly how to display them. So here
are a few hints to help your browser out:
Images: You should always specify the exact size of your images in your IMG tags. This
prevents the browser from having to figure out the size on its own. To specify the size, use
the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes.
Example: <IMG SRC="tips.gif" WIDTH="61" HEIGHT="33">
You can get the exact size of the image right from your web browser. This is done slightly
differently in Netscape and MSIE. In Netscape, load the image by itself in the browser.
Then at the very top of the browser, the dimensions will be displayed. In MSIE, right-click
on the image and select Properties. The window that pops up will provide the dimensions
of the image. In both cases, the dimensions are given as "AxB pixels". A (the first number)
is the width of the image. B (the second number) is the height of the image.
Tables: Table widths can be specified in a couple different ways. You can either specify
it as an exact number of pixels or as a percentage of the web browser width. (To be continued...)
Using Frames Wisely
Relative vs Absolute Paths
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