Advice on How to Improve Your Web Presentation

This page contains some advice on how to improve your web presentation based on mistakes I have seen in students projects.

  1. Make sure the main file of your presentation is called index.html. This will allow me to access your presentation at http://astro.armstrong.edu/~username/. Links to the main file of your presentation are customarily called Home (not Index).
  2. Your HTML pages should have the same title used for <title> tag and for <h1> tag.
  3. Your HTML pages should be correct. Here are some common mistakes: HTML pages have more than one <body> tag, the <html> tag is not the last tag in the file
  4. Use suggestive names for your pages. Names like "first.html", "second.html" don't help find pages in your presentation. Imagine that you have ten HTML pages and you want to edit one with a specific content. It will be pretty hard to find it unless you have suggestive names for files.
  5. Be very restrained about using a background image for your pages. Background images are tiled in web pages, and few images are designed to be tiled nicely. Your presentation can be viewed from a monitor with a different resolution than yours, and usually that means your image won't fill nicely the browser window.
  6. Be very restrained about using blinking text or scrolling text.
  7. Favor semantic tags over syntactic tags
  8. When you use width and height attributes for the <img> tag to scale a picture, make sure you scale it horizontally and vertically in the same proportion. You should only make a picture bigger using width and height. If you want to make a picture smaller use an Image Editing software to achieve this.
  9. You should use the same size font for all your pages. Regular text in your pages should use the default font size. I advise against words written with all capital letters.
  10. Scientific papers or articles may be couple of pages long. A web presentations containing the same material must be broken in sections containing the main points. This can be done by breaking the article in several HTML pages or by adding a table of contents at the beginning of the article containing links to the various sections of the article. Adding relevant pictures for each section will also improve the presentation.
  11. Do not add videos or music that starts playing automatically. Your page might be viewed by someone with a slow connection.
  12. Your page should contain only ASCII characters. The most common illegal characters you might have in your pages are fancy single quotes or double quotes. Contrast the following ‘word’ enclosed by fancy single quotes and the same 'word' enclosed by regular single quotes.