Image Is Everything

Home Office Computing,  Dec, 1999  by Bonny L. Georgia

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These tips and tools will help increase your online credibility and keep customers happy

LIKE CARS, WEB SITES NEED REGULAR maintenance to keep them running smoothly and looking their best. But you don't need to empty your wallet or hire a Webmaster to help keep your pages in top shape. These handy tune-up tools and add-on services make polishing your site painless--and they'll cost you next to nothing.

Clean Up Your Code Building basic Web pages doesn't require a programming degree or special skills--WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft FrontPage 2000 help you create and maintain Web sites easily. However, using these tools to design your site doesn't guarantee it'll be in top form. Browser incompatibilities, broken links, and slow-loading pages are frustrating to visitors and can occur no matter what Web editor you use.

Modern HTML editors have built-in spelling and link checkers, but a host of other helpful (and free) utilities exist that offer similar collections of tools, such as Andover.net's HTMLWorks (www.htmlworks.com), MSN LinkExchange's Site Inspector (siteinspector.linkexchange.com), and Netscape's Web Site Garage (www. websitegarage.com. With just a few clicks, you can check how quickly pages download, validate your HTML syntax to ensure your pages work correctly, and test the compatibility of your pages in several browsers.

What varies between these services is the number of Web pages and links you're allowed to check at one time for free. If you'd rather service your entire site in one shot, HTML Toolbox (www.netmechanic.com) lets you tweak as many as 400 pages weekly, biweekly, or monthly (prices start at $9.99 a month for up to 50 pages).

Optimize Images Large Web graphics, animations, and sound files increase download time--and if your site takes more than 30 seconds to load, you've likely lost a visitor. The smaller the images are, the faster your Web page will load. You can decrease download time without sacrificing image quality by significantly compressing GIF and JPEG images.

NetMechanic's Gif Wizard (www. gifwizard.com) and GifBot (www. netmechanic.com/accelerate.htm) are two of the best free tools for fixing image bloat. These services look at every graphic on your site and show variations of the same image at different color depths and compression ratios. You choose the best combination of small size and good looks, and then replace the current image with the optimized one.

Still, it's best to make a habit of trimming the fat from your graphics before they go live. Web-savvy image editors such as Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro 6 ($99; www.jasc.com) can help you with this.

Don't forget to use commonsense tricks to decrease page size. Reducing the dimensions of large pictures, ditching the funky backgrounds, and removing unnecessary animations or sound files can greatly improve your professional image online--and trim download time as well.

Serve Up Big Business Extras Clean, consistent looks; searchable content; and interactive features will help enhance your online credibility and keep customers happy. These features weren't always easy for neophytes to implement with HTML, but now there's no reason to skip the extras when they're easy to add for free.

First, provide a search utility for easier browsing. There's no need to do a complicated server-side installation when companies such as Atomz.com (www.atomz.com), SiteMiner (www. siteminer.com), and PicoSearch (www. picosearch.com) can do the indexing for you. Simply place a search form on your site; when a visitor enters information, the utility sifts through the site index and builds a list of links to related content.

Next, give your site a community feel by providing ways for visitors to interact with one another and with your business. Urbanite's ToolZone (www.toolzone.com) lets you add a "clip-on" chat room that's HTML-based, so there are no fancy Java applets to download.

Although guest books aren't as flashy as live chat, they let visitors leave a permanent mark at your site with comments and questions. Guestbook4Free (www.guestbook4free.com) and GuestBook.com (www.guestbook.com) offer tools that that let you set up a guest book in as little as 5 minutes.

For the ultimate in interactivity, turn visitors into customers by becoming an online merchant. E-commerce is no longer just for the Amazon.coms of the world--anyone can set up a no-cost shopping cart online at FreeMerchant.com (www.freemerchant.com). Your online catalog is configurable. Freemerchant.com will even let you use a CyberCash account (www.cybercash. com) for customers to make instant credit card transactions.

Need to know what your customers think of a new product or service? Poll them. A service called EZPolls (ezpolls.superstats.com) designs customized Q&As, complete with the code to put them online; it then tracks the answers and displays the results as a bar graph.

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