Elementary web design I

To successfully author HTML web pages when hard-coding (or coding “by hand”) one must abandon normal English rules and syntax.

RULES for document naming conventions.

  1. Always name your home page index.html. (WHY? All browsers look for index.html as the first page.)
  2. Because of rule number 1, never use an upper case i to name your index.html page. Never. If you name your page Index.html, no one will ever see it but yo u.
  3. Do not EVER use any punctuation, or spaces in your naming conventions. For example: Red Balloon!.html is bad, but red_balloon.html is good. (WHY: Even though passwords are encouraged to have special characters, servers can’t read these characters.)
  4. Use only an underscore _ or hyphon – to separate document names. (WHY: The server and browser can’t read spaces)

Best Practices

  1. Do not use upper case letters for any other pages or images, or for that matter, ANY files you upload to the web.  If you name a .jpg or .png with an uppercase letter, some CMS programs, such as the one used for the SUNY Ulster Website, Omni Update, will not allow you to upload the image at all. )
  2. Do not have a document name longer than 8 characters.
    (WHY? Reason 1: old best practice for Windows servers. Reason 2: Because you are less likely to misspell a simple URL if you are doing it all by scratch.)