Once in awhile you come across a website that looks good with a particular browser but view it with a different browser, and you can't even read the text on the page. The worst thing that can happen is for most of your visitors to not see and understand what it is you are saying through your site.
It is therefore important that some things should be considered when planning on taking your marketing in this complicated and cruel online business.
First, navigability and functionality should come before artistic excellence. It is useless to make your site a masterpiece if users cannot navigate around it. Even after they reach the main page, they have no clue as to how to go where they want to go.
Images enhance the look of a page. But it is not advisable to go overboard in stuffing your page with loads of images. Remember that most net-surfers use a dial-up connection. The average time to load a page should be no longer than 5 seconds.
If it is longer, the surfer will most probably click away elsewhere. So, within this time, all the images on a page must be loaded as well. To give an estimate, keep the aggregate page size less than 30k.
A couple of more attributes that make your pages load faster are the height and width attributes. Without these, the browser must wait for the image to download since it cannot know how much space to leave for them.
Java is yet another often-misused technology on webpages. There are various things you can do with Java but that does not mean you should do all of them. Java applets are known to run slower, so users experience certain sluggishness in performance.
Besides, Java has been known to crash certain browsers. This is not something everyone likes, especially if it is done for the sole purpose of showing a set of images in a slideshow.
Never underestimate the importance of those meta tags. They can make all the difference between your users coming to your site and going over to your competitors.
