One thing any self-respecting web design guru will tell you is that when designing a site, it pays to think big. This comes naturally to some people, but many of us are used to belittling our accomplishments as much as we can.
When putting together a site, it is very easy to forget that once all the pieces have been put in place and the site has been uploaded to the web, if the content is good enough and hits the right nerve, chances are good that you could attract many more visitors than you originally imagined.
However, all this extra popularity comes at a price. When a large number of visitors come to your site, things can quickly start to stop. Bandwidth can get clogged, overused services can get clogged, access times can go through the roof, and at the end of it all, there’s a real chance that your site will bite into the digital dust and refuse to load. Which, as we all know, is definitely not a good thing.
When sites go down, one thing is sure to happen that people won’t visit in droves. Once your loyal bettors are upset, you can guarantee that your email inbox will start to fill with angry and critical emails, which is enough to take a toll on the confidence of even the toughest Flash fiddler. So what can you do? Well, it turns out, quite a bit.
Make your site universal
Before we start talking about what you can do to speed things up and make sure your site doesn’t buckle under pressure from a large influx of visitors, let’s take a look at some of the things that can help attract people in the first place. . .
Perhaps the most obvious principle to keep in mind is that the fastest way to get visitors is to make the site as welcoming as possible. We are not talking about a nice introductory paragraph on your home page, but rather pointing out that the site must be able to attract visitors using a wide range of browsers. There is no use receiving 400,000 visits a day if only a third of that number can enter and use the thing. There is nothing more annoying to a web gambler than a large message that the page you are trying to view cannot be displayed in your browser, even if you are using a beta version of the latest Netscape clone.
To combat this, it makes sense to make sure you don’t build your site from scratch with just one user in mind. Not everyone on the web uses Internet Explorer to surf the web, so if the site is not viewable in that browser, you will be neglecting a large number of people. In addition to all the different browsers available, it is also worth noting that many people do not want to update their browser software and therefore may be using the same old version that appeared with their copy of Windows 95.
To this end, any unique features of original IE version 6+ that you employ will be totally lost to these users, and may even prevent the site from loading.
This, as everyone will tell you, is not good for business. Don’t be tempted to fill your pages with lots and lots of javaScript or other advanced code that can make older or less advanced browsers crash. Instead, opt for a more functional interface to accommodate the widest possible demographics. It is also evident that you should try
your design in a variety of browsers at every stage of the process, to make sure everything is as cross-platform as possible. Don’t just test things last, because it might take a lot of work to fix a mistake that was made early in the build.
Lastly, it is also not a good idea to include a large number of nested tables in the layout. These are known to slow down access times for many users, and again, those using older software may have trouble viewing them. Instead, try to counteract this by using cascading style sheets (any self-respecting web designer should do this by default now). It is a universal method of handling design issues such as fonts and visual text layouts, and it goes a long way toward ensuring that every site visitor sees the site as they intended, with very few compatibility issues. It also means that you have to write less code, which we think you will agree to makes the prospect instantly attractive.
Update regularly
But no matter how usable the site is, the most important thing to remember if you want to keep your hit count is that you need to update the content of the site regularly. While visitors may flock to your new site, all singing and dancing, by the thousands when it is first uploaded online, once they’ve read every word and seen every image, they’ll want more. And you have to provide it, or else these picky folks will take their business elsewhere, and your hit counter will stabilize in an embarrassing and unrewarding way.
Therefore, it is of utmost importance to continue supplying new material for your consumers. The best and most popular sites take supply and demand extremely seriously, with portals like BBCi, news provider Sky News, and even your typical ISP’s home page all competing to update their content countless times a day for keep it as up-to-date and attractive as possible. .
Of course, this can be a daunting prospect if you have to code each and every update yourself, but luckily this task can be made a lot easier if you move your site to a server-based database. In this way, you can quickly track new material on relevant pages almost automatically, without having to waste time coding new objects and images into the layout. It also gives you a lot more time to create original content in the first place, making it a win-win situation.
But if you don’t feel like transporting things to a database, you can achieve similar results by employing a content management system. These are most often used by large sites that need to process large volumes of material, but that doesn’t mean you have to be mega rich to use one. In fact, smaller bettors may want to check out the OpenCMS Project, which provides users with an unlicensed CMS built around bohemian open source code. It’s worth a look and can save you a great deal of time and effort, not to mention cash.
Rationalization
If you start updating your site regularly through one of these more automated options, a side effect that will quickly become apparent is that it’s best to keep page sizes to a minimum. There is no point spending years updating oodles of information on a single page on a large site, because the chances of people noticing it are pretty remote. So one trick is to keep your material small but plentiful.
But this does not mean that the only benefits that can be obtained are in terms of time savings. In fact, smaller pages are one of the best ways to ensure that bandwidth and access times remain consistently high. Remember all those people who were queuing up to access your site? Well, keep the page size to a minimum, and the time it takes for each user to load a page will be shortened accordingly, making everything flow immediately. Simply put, the more compact your code, the faster it can be delivered to your bettors.
Along with this, it also makes sense to keep other content, such as images and videos, as small as possible. Never forget that a lot of surfers aren’t experiencing the joys of broadband, and these folks won’t appreciate making them wait five minutes to download a large picture or QuickTime movie. So, reduce those images to screen resolution (72 dpi) and compress them as much as possible in JPEG mode for quick display times. Also, don’t forget to slice larger images to help transfer speeds.
When all is said and done, the most important thing to remember is that the smaller your site, the faster it will respond. Quick sites are a favorite of all web surfers, and they can also be updated much more quickly and easily on the production side. Lastly, small, nimble sites are much less likely to collapse in the face of a horde of concurrent users, clearly bringing us back to where we started. Only this time, instead of thinking big, it may be that the best design principles come from thinking small.