"LESS
IS MORE" - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Welcome
The
purpose of this site is to help people to make
their own website at minimal cost - a website
that WORKS.
If
you'd rather just have one made, you can pay me
to do that at retrokat.com.
This site is for people who are willing to put
in the time and effort to do it themself, but
need a little help with sorting through the whole
process.
Depending
on your experience and interest, you might want
to read through the whole site in a linear way
(like a book), or you can use the navigation to
the left or the sitemap
to find particular sections that interest you.
You
may have noticed - no bells & whistles here.
Low-tech has always been my motto for websites,
long before the Web Usability movement sprung
into being. Although I studied Multimedia, for
reasons of access and equity I've always avoided
anything requiring a Plug-in, specific browser
or anything else that limited use of my sites.
I happily plugged away making simple, usable websites
while the whole "Kazam!" style of web
development boomed for a few years. Then, people
started to notice - fancy sites didn't rank. They
didn't even work properly for a lot of people.
They were difficult and expensive to update.
Pioneers
like Steve Krug pointed to the success of sites
like amazon.com,
google.com,
yahoo.com
and ebay.com
and increased the awareness of web usability.
Low-tech sites that ranked well and worked on
any browser/operating system became popular. Clients
awareness of such issues led to a backlash against
fancy sites and the demand for simple sites, sites
that just WORK has boomed.
Who
this ISN'T for: Big companies, or businesses
who will be selling a large variety of stock online.
Large, corporate sites need to be dynamic. That
is, they need a database backend and they need
to be updatable easily and automatically. This
can be achieved either with CSS (a type of code
where the content is separated from the layout)
or a Content Managment System. I don't do either
of those, so they're not covered in this site.
They are specialised areas that companies can
afford to pay for.
Who
this IS for: small businesses and individuals
who want to build and maintain their own simple,
small site. I'll show you how to make a fixed
HTML-based site using tables. You'll be able to
update it yourself, to easily and quickly change
pictures and text. If you want to redesign it,
to give it a different look, then that will pretty
much involve starting again - so plan it well.
I'll
also cover the basics of making sites for others,
subhosting them and thus spreading the 'No Fancy
Stuff' ethos. Site administration using cPanel
is fairly simple and straightforward, so if you're
fairly web-savvy you shouldn't have too much trouble
running sites for both yourself and others.
I'm
no Graphic Designer, but I'll also give some tips
about making a site that also looks 'quite nice'.
My dyslexic partner finds the extreme text-based
Usability sites very difficult to use - so I try
to find a balance between simplicity and... well,
being easy on the eye.
Created
text-only June 1999, reborn 2001, overhauled January
2004
last updated 16 October 2005 - aimed completion
end of 2005
NOTE:
This site is currently in the process of being
rebuilt. I do this for free, so give me a break! |