Ryan McFarland

Sean Hegar asked me the other day for some tips on web design. So i thought i’d provide a few resources…

An easy and free way to make a favorite icon (favicon.ico) for your site can be done at this website. Favicons appear in Internet Explorer instead of the generic blue “e” icon when someone has your site bookmarked. Mozilla and Firefox (and others i presume) users see all site’s favicons. My site currently uses a “Z!” icon. You do need to add a little html to the head of your site to get it to work - but that line of code is given to you after you create your image.

If you plan on putting your email address on your site make sure it is encoded so that spam bots can’t find it. There are a few different ways to prevent the harvesting of your email address but Hiveware provides a free online encoder.

To make your page load faster you can stay on top of your image compression. Here’s another free tool that tells you how to optimize your images and even shows you the change inthe appearance of your image based on different levels of compression. I have started using .png files for my site because i like their flawless color, detail, and ease of creation. Unfortunately, i pay for those features with a larger file size and thus a longer download time for visitors.

Of course, there is a lot to learn about css, xml, and many other confusing acronyms. We’ll get to those later.