Operation Manual

Starting from Scratch 61
Step 3: Finishing touches
Before publishing your site to the Web—in effect, throwing open the
front door and inviting the world—you’ll want to brush the cobwebs
from every corner. Review the advice in the preceding chapter, and
consider this checklist:
♦
Have you used the WebPlus proofing tools to enhance the quality
of your text?
♦ Have you run the Layout Checker to inspect for possible
problems?
♦
Have you specified a Web site title and added search engine
descriptors (in )LOH:HE6LWH3URSHUWLHV)?
♦ Have you previewed your site in a Web browser—preferably in
several different browsers?
♦
Have you reduced graphic file sizes to a minimum to improve load
time?
Design tips and rules of thumb
♦
The “performance” of your page is how long it takes for the whole
page, including text and graphics, to display completely in a Web
browser. Basically, it’s proportional to the total file size of its
graphics. As a rule of thumb, use 60K bytes per page as a
maximum. You can stretch the rule a bit for the Home page.
♦
You can determine the actual size of your files by publishing one
page at a time to a local folder (using the 3XEOLVKWR)ROGHU
button), then using Windows Explorer to examine the contents of
the folder. View the files by date and 6KLIW-select the most recent
batch, then right-click and choose 3URSHUWLHV to see the aggregate
byte count. Obviously, the lower the better.
♦
To reduce the total size of your graphics, aside from using fewer
graphics, make them no larger than they need to be to get your
point across. Since file size increases as the square of each
dimension, shrinking both height and width by 50% reduces the
file size by 75%.