The loading speed of pages is important to success, so an external style sheet and minimal graphics have been used on information pages, especially the frequently visited pages. Graphic images take a lot longer to download than text.

The first website made for the Society respected this aim but having been made before the use of style sheet technology, it was less able to combine visual attraction and small file size. The aim for this website is to provide more visual interest and a more intuitive navigation system, with smaller text and (generally) shorter pages, using colour theming associated with age, around fawn, brown, gold and maroon.

The site offers factsheets, beginners guides, and free downloads of useful data to assist those beginning family history research - i.e. the target website audience.

The menu structure accords priority to beginners by having the help and explanatory pages at the top. Clear, bold page headings have been used to reinforce understanding of the navigation system.

The coding standard is (broadly) html version "4.01 transitional" This is the standard immediately prior to the current one. 

When designing a website for use by an audience with equipment of all vintages, it is safest to use a coding standard that has been in use for about 4 to 5 years.

Essentially this means that browsers up to five years old will see it as intended. Older browser versions (ie those current 8-10 years ago) will still find the site readable and useable, but the older browsers will not be able to see the full visual effect of the design (For example, they may only display 213 colours, whereas today's browsers and computers can display millions of colour shades.)

Before starting work on the pages, you should consider  filenames for your pages, and file structures for use on your website.

Because of the wide range of equipment connected to and using the internet, designers should restrict themselves to the use of filenames that follow the 8.3 convention. 

In other words, although Microsoft allows you to create filenames with spaces, underscores and hyphens in them, and to use long filenames, that does not mean that non Microsoft equipment will display them. Some versions of Netscape for example, will fail to display a page that has a space in the filename, as will some of the non-Microsoft web servers. Equally, some web servers are case-sensitive and see "A" as a wholly different character from "a". 

So always use lower-case filenames with a maximum of 8 alpha-numeric characters followed by a full stop and three more alpha numeric characters to designate the file type.

With a big website like LFHHS, a filing system is essential to divide up the pages into a hierarchy of folders. Each folder should have an associated "images" folder holding the images for that section of the website and so on.

Avoid the use of frames like the plague. They will preclude your site being found (or even listed) by some of the search engines, and those that do will list and index each frame separately, so people will be transported to, and find themselves looking at nothing more than a menu, or worse, the frame used for the body of the page (with no way out of it).

Differing screen resolutions present an often unseen problem. Because we all see the internet through our own PC and screen, we tend to think everyone sees the same thing. This is not so. Older equipment may only be able to display screens that are 640 pixels wide. The most popular width is 800 pixels, and the newer large screens will show 1024 pixels. If pages are made too wide, the user has to scroll sideways to see them. Equally if designs are made for only 640 pixels wide, the whole website becomes a column up the middle of the users screen. Both irritating and avoidable.

To accommodate these variations, the widths of tables used to display data are expressed as percentages rather than fixed widths. Thus the data expands and contracts to meet the needs of the equipment in use.

If you want to see the effect of screen resolution on your designs, a small free to download programme called "Browser Sizer" can show you.

In general, this site is optimised for the most popular resolution of 800 x 600, but aims to display almost as well in the other two main screen resolution settings

There are many types of Browsers in use today. At the time of building, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominates the market. Current estimates of the number of people who use one or other versions of "IE" range from about 75% to 90%.

Netscape's popularity seems to be dwindling to between 8% and 20%. However, on a worldwide basis, even small percentages like this may be large numbers of people, and there are many people using other types of browser. Opera, AOL, CompuServe and Lynx (which is a text-only browser, incapable of displaying images) are all in use, with versions offering different capabilities. All render the page slightly differently

A good designer will acquire a range of Browser types (and versions) to test the effect of his website as others see it.

Printers complicate matters even further. There is a huge range in use, with print types ranging from fixed width narrow platen through laser colour. This needs consideration when looking at page width, and it is generally accepted that any page should be capable of adequate and understandable display if the browser is made only 525 pixels wide.

Style Sheets are a recent development, and are important for the future. Instead of using a complex set of html tags to set the font, face, colour, size, weight, and other features, of each piece of text on the website. Style sheets allow you to make up definitions of text types and then apply these much shorter tag attributes to blocks of text and even to other features on the site. Follow this link for an example of the styles used on this website. 

When using fonts, remember that to be seen as you wish it to be seen, the viewer's computer has to have the same font installed that you specify in the Webpage. To ensure maximum compatibility, use one of the fonts that accompanies the Microsoft operating system as your first choice, and remember also that Apple computers use a different font range, so you need to include an alternative for them. The common Microsoft ones are: Arial; Comic Sans; Georgia; Invite; Tahoma; Trebuchet; and Verdana.