Web Site Support - How-Tos

ACCESSIBILITY - Your Web site may be required to meet certain Web Content Accessibility guidelines to make it accessible to people with disabilities. You can find those guidelines at the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative page. SitePoint has a great Introduction To Accessible Web Design, and you can find lots of tips and ways to improve your site's accessibility at All Things Web. (Thanks, Gini Spurr.) There's also a new U.S. law that requires certain Web sites to be handicapped accessible. Is your Web site accessible? The Center for Applied Special Technology has a free web-based tool called Bobby that will test your site and tell you which parts of it need to be changed to be more accessible. When your site meets Bobby's approval, you are entitled to use the "Bobby Approved" icon on your site. (Thanks, Mark Peterson.) Accessify.com, which has tools and tips for making your site more accessible, also has a free online accessible table builder that will generate tables for you that include accessibility code (something that Dreamweaver and FrontPage don't do).

ACTIVE SERVER PAGES - Getting Started With ASP - An introduction to the VBScript programming language, and how to use it to create dynamic Web pages with ASP.

Display Resolution and Your Web Pages - How to keep users' different display resolutions from ruining the design of your Web pages.

Five Ways To Make Your Site Better - Make your Web site stand out from the crowd. Plus, subscribe to a weekly newsletter that will give you all the latest tips for working on your Web site.

FrontPage Do's and Don'ts - SiteCrafters' extremely useful list of several things to remember to do, and several things to remember to never do, when creating a FrontPage Web.

Help & How To: Web Development - ZDNet covers every topic from starting your first Web page to creating animated images, to adding Meta tags.

How To Set Up A WebCam - A Google search that reveals many articles with that same topic.

How To Spamproof Your Site - Use a simple JavaScript to display your email address on your site in a way that prevents spambots from harvesting it.

Make Your Gifs Dance - ZDNet's step-by-step guide to creating animated Gifs, using simple and free tools.

Outputting Web Sites to CD-ROM - Why would you may want to save your Web sites to CD-ROM? This site tells you why, as well as how to do it. You may have to find this topic in the list of topics on the page. The last time I looked, it was topic #24.

Preventing Image Bandwidth With .htaccess - Describes how to put a simple file in your "images" folder to prevent other Web sites from directly linking to your images on their pages. Includes links to other articles on stopping bandwidth thieves.

Pricing Web Work - What Should You Charge? - Some helpful tips and information from Matt Mickiewicz, author of the popular SitePoint Tribune Webmaster's newsletter.

Redirect Web Pages Using the Meta Refresh Tag - Add one line of code to the <HEAD> section of a Web page to cause it to automatically send a visitor to a different page.

ROBOTS.TXT - By creating a robots.txt file in your site's root folder (where your home page is), you can specify which search engines can/cannot spider your site's content, and which folders they cannot spider. WebToolCentral.com and 1-hit.com each have a free online automatic Robots.txt file generator, and Motoricerca.info has an automatic Robots.txt checker that will make sure that your Robots.txt is error-free and valid.

Rounded Corner Tables - How to get that rounded-corners look that makes Web sites look more professional.

Scanning Tips - Scanners can do a really nice job of digitizing whatever you want, but they can also do a lousy job, if you don't know how to use them properly. Here's a whole bunch of useful tips for getting the most out of your scanner.

Spamproof Your Site - By adding just a few lines of JavaScript (provided in the article) to your Web pages, you can display your clickable email address link for your site's visitors while hiding it from spambots that harvest email addresses for spammers. This is the method that I use to display my email address in the footer of each of my Web pages.

SPEEDING UP YOUR WEB PAGES - Fast Tips For Fast Downloads includes four simple-but-important tips for making sure your Web pages load a fast as possible.

The Website Development Process - I highly recommend this very cute and accurate presentation of the development steps, using little plastic dolls to act them out.

The Worst Web Site Mistakes - Make sure your Web site doesn't make any of these common mistakes.