Consider the Purpose of and Audience for Your Web Page

If you have a business you want to promote online, you'll want visitors to know who you are, what you do and how they can get in touch with you. If you are a fan or a hobbyist, your page could showcase your interests, offering information for fellow enthusiasts, along with pictures and maybe a set of links that will lead to related sites. Alternatively, there's nothing wrong with creating a page just to showcase yourself. Be advised, however, that your personal page will be unlikely to attract a whole lot of visitors. It may at least give you the satisfaction of being an international (if unknown) cultural figure.

Think about what images you should include on your page and what they will contribute. Although it has become less of a concern thanks to the prevalence of high-speed Internet, remember that, for users with more primitive connections, large images take longer to download. This concern becomes even greater when dealing with multimedia, such as video and audio clips, which require much larger files.

Determine how much information you want to include on the page. If your page is short, readers generally will not have a problem with scrolling down to read the content. Ideally, though, a visitor should be able to get most of the useful information about a page from the section that appears in the browser upon arrival. If there is a lot of information on a page, you might consider two options. One is to break up this information into separate web pages and provide links to these pages from your home page, or you can create a table of contents at the top of your page that provides links to information later on the page.

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