FreeCharity.org.uk welcomes the Sea Trust Blog to our list of hosted sites. Sea Trust was formed as the marine arm of the south west Wales Wildlife Trust. Sea Trust volunteers survey monitor and record marine life off the coast of Pembrokeshire.
Many web designers try to work the presentation website too hard. Instead of accepting the limitations of the format, they continuously adjust their design and code to try and maintain an illusion of control over the precise presentation of their pages. The design often ends up complicated, fragile and difficult to maintain. Accept that your page may not appear exactly as you would like it, create a design that works well enough, and you can spend less time worrying and put your effort into other parts of your site.
Don’t make the mistake of using a more complicated and proprietary format than is absolutely necessary to present your information. Your readers want simple and quick access to information and anything that gets in the way of this – such as the downloading of a plugin to view a file – is off-putting. Don’t place information inside a Microsoft Word document when it can be just as well presented directly in a web page. If you do feel that you need precise control over the document’s presentation use a format such as Adobe’s PDF but remember
that not everyone has Acrobat installed.
Keep the number of formats used on your website to the minimum possible; preferably use nothing in your pages beyond HTML. If you do post word processor documents to your website be consistent about their use: don’t use a mix of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice formats, pick one and stick with it.
The most important lesson here is to think carefully about the use of a particular format: what are its weaknesses and strengths, why is it necessary and how will it impact your readers?