Tools Of The Net Trade

To establish a presence on the Web, you

need a variety of tools. Some programs are the bread and butter tools—like an HTML

coder, a plethora of search engines for visibility etc.—and still others are the

gizmo tools, which help pep up your site, or enable you to perform tasks. Below, we

outline some of the most critical.

HTML Coders: Nobody writes HTML by

hand—it is too cumbersome, and the time taken does not justify the effort. It is much

better to use a variety of easily-available tools to generate the bulk of your code for

you. True, you may still need to manually edit your HTML code once in a while, but this is

only for some more interesting tweaking.

High-end systems may require the likes of

MS Front Page, but at the low end, we have found Lorenz Graf’s HTML Tool to be very

capable. This tool makes it a snap to set up your site, and test it locally before

uploading it to your web server for all to see. But whatever tool you use,

beware—many of them pack powerful utilities that enable you to script with CGI, or

add JavaScript and Java applets, or use stylesheets. Often, it is all too easy to get

seduced by the power, and end up with a site that looks a bit like jumbled spaghetti. It

is best to stick to standard HTML, which is visible with even older versions of web

browsers.

Graphic Packages: Utilities like

Paint Shop Pro and Corel Xara come in handy when you are designing the graphical

components of your site. These powerful packages have a variety of options that enable you

to create some really eye-catching graphics. The main warning we have here is, keep your

graphics small, and use them only when necessary—too many Web users create large,

garish visuals which add only to the time taken to download them, and not necessarily to

the general visual impact of the site.

GIF Animators: Seen those cute

little graphics that seem to look like a poor man’s TV on the Web? these are called

animated GIFs, a feature supported by the GIF 89a standard which allows you to store

multiple GIF images in a single file. Sometimes, these can be very eye-catching,

especially with advertisement banners and the like. One good package in this category is

MS GIF Animator.

Checkers: No, we are not discussing

that ancient board game here. A variety of packages like CheckWeb allow you to check the

integrity of your site on your local hard disk even before you upload the files to your

site. The simpler ones just check to see if any of your links are broken; the more

advanced ones even analyze compatibility with a variety of browsers and standards,

spelling errors, page ‘weight’ (essentially the size of all the components like

the HTML code, and images, which go into a page etc.), besides offering you tips on

effective design. A good tool can save you a lot of time, besides enabling you to escape

the embarrassment of ‘404 Not Found’ bloopers on your site, an error caused by

broken links. A good tool for this purpose is Check Web.

Search Engines: Once up and running,

you have to ensure that you get publicity. You do this by registering with a variety of

search engines, a process achieved by submitting your URL to these sites. One of the

fastest is Alta Vista, which indexes your site in just a couple of days; one of the best

is Yahoo!, which uses a category index, maintained by humans as opposed to Web crawler

agents. While Yahoo! takes a little time—anywhere from two to four weeks—because

a human being actually visits your site and then determines its fitness for inclusion, it

is worth the wait because of its extreme popularity on the Web.

Common Sense: They say that for most

activities, all you need is an active imagination; on the Web, common sense is more

important. Many budding designers use garish colors, unnecessary JavaScript code and Java

applets, frames etc., which are normally not necessary. Stick to the simple—that

huge, 50 kB (by Web standards, a 50 kB GIF is really huge) GIF may look very appealing and

cheerful, but while it will attract 10 people who don’t mind waiting for a nice GIF

to download, it will drive away a 100 potential visitors—make that customers—who

don’t have the time or the bandwidth to waste on silly little images. One day, the

Web will be accessible by all at a speed of over a 100 Mbps; but until that day arrives,

most of us will be on 28.8 to 56 Kbps dial-up lines, and most of us don’t like

waiting for huge files to download.