Thank you for visiting WebMasterKnowHow.com - If you can suggest things that should be added to the site I would like to hear about them. Anything regarding hosting, HTML, attracting traffic, problems and mistakes. I intend to make this site as useful as I can, and with that in mind I'm trying to add at least one new topic every week.
Typical mistakes beginners make
- I uploaded all my files for the very first time, but when I go to see my new site, I still see the temporary page the hosting company put there
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Did you name your main page index.html?
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Did you read the instructions your hosting company sent you about where the files should go? Different hosting companies use different folders. Some use WWW, others HTTPDOCS, and others will use others. You won't know what yours uses until you read what they tell you.
- My pictures don't show on the page
- Did you remember to upload the pictures to your host computer along with the HTML for the page?
- Does the name of the picture match EXACTLY the name your html code specifies? Capitalization counts. No spaces allowed.
- Are the HTML page and the picture in the same directory? If not, the HTML code must tell exactly where the picture is.
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My page looks fine with Internet Explorer, but with Netscape Navigator it's blank
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If you used a Microsoft program to make your website, there may be something in the code that Microsoft browsers understand and others don't.
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If you hand-coded it, be sure to check that you have closing tags in any tables on the page. When I make a page that doesn't work it's usually because I forgot a closing tag or a closing quote mark.
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If your page name has spaces in it, or any characters other than letters, numbers, underscores, and dashes, some browsers will have a problem with it.
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I typed my URL into the search box but my website didn't come up
- A lot of people new to the net don't understand the way search engines and addresses work. If you know the URL (address) of a site, you don't use a search engine, you just put the URL into the address bar at the top of your browser window. Search engines are for when you don't know the URL and want the Search Engine to find the information for you. When your page is new the search engines won't have found it yet, so they can't show it to you.
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Why does my page take so long to load?
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The main reason pages seem to take longer to load is the size of the images. If you start with a huge image, and tell the HTML code to shrink it, so it is tiny on the page, that doesn't make the actual size of the image file any smaller. The whole big image is loaded onto your visitor's computer, then it is shrunk for display on the page. You need to start out with an image that is the same size as you want it on the page. There are programs available that will make the size of image files a lot smaller without significantly hurting the quality of the picture.
- Some people just have too much stuff on their pages. I know it's fun to have all your pictures right out there where everyone will be able to see them, but it can sure slow down the page loading time. If you just have a few, with a link to the others, your visitors will be less likely to leave before your page finishes loading.
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I made a change to my page but when I went to look at the new page it was still the same.
- Did you remember to upload the modified page to your host computer?
- Did the name of your page get changed while you worked on it? I have spent hours going around in circles chasing this one. I would edit one page, and then look at a page with a similar name, and I couldn't understand why it didn't change. After a good night's sleep it all began to make sense again.
- Are you looking at a cached page? use your reload button, and if that doesn't work, hold down the shift key and reload again. Some ISP's (AOL in particular) think they know what a certain page looks like, so when you ask it to show it to you again, they just show you the one they found last time they looked. Shift-reload usually fixes that.
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When I look at my website using my own computer it all looks fine. When my friends look at it with their computer, the pictures don't show, or they do show but they overlap and cover other pictures or some of the text.
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Are you showing the images that are on your host computer, or the ones on your own computer? If you have used an image that exsts only on your own computer, of course your friends won't be able to see it. This problem frequently happens when people use programs to make the code. The programs assume the images will stay on your computer.
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Have you checked your pages with various window sizes and font sizes? You can easily change your window size by grabbing the edge and stretching it and shrinking it. See what happens if your page gets too narrow. You can change the text size in your browser, and that should be checked too.
- My link doesn't work!
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If the thing you are linking to is in the same directory as the page linking, you can just put its name in the link. If it is in a different directory you need to put the correct address. The easiest way to do that is to give the complete URL. There are ways to make relative addresses, but that's too complicated to explain here.
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Did you put a "/" at the end of a link to an HTML page? The slash is only for the end of a link to a directory or a domain name.
