Rosa Acosta

Web Page Problems and Solutions

Working close to our content team in my previous job made me realize the different aspects during the troubleshooting phase for a web site. The job was to assist the not only the graphic artists, but also the technical people in charged on executing the project. The project itself consisted on a site re-design; which took over a year for a new concept and brand new content. It was very important for the team to have complete knowledge on what everyone in the company wanted as a new site, and mainly to make it work in such a short period of time.

First, the IT and graphics team decided to launch the beta version to all the employees before reaching the customers. A lot of things went wrong for the first week, but this seemed normal to everyone, since the problems were resolved in no time! There were issues that did not concern many people, but issues that made the entire team realize what needed to be done to improve the website. For example; links were broken, images had red x instead of an image and the navigation was not as smooth as before.

The team behind any website require many hours of work; and it seem that when errors are found on it, there is even more hours to invest to make it work! It might be a tedious job to go back from the beginning and figure out what went wrong. These are the circumstances when useful tools on different software come in very helpful; such as Dreamweaver, FrontPage and others.

There are also many tools on the website itself to help developers on troubleshooting a website like W3C's XHTML Validator. The job that we were doing was Transitional XHTML. We tried to keep most of the content from the old website, but still giving it a touch of beauty with more video content and 3-D images also.

Another aspect when troubleshooting a site is to get feedback from the customers and employees. This is the best way to make sure that the website works on any platform and on any browser also. Make the website as light as possible of content for people who still have a slow connection to avoid frustration on their side. A good site takes time and dedication to avoid future frustrations with errors and fixes. It is inevitable to not have errors on a website, but the less errors the happier the audience and more traffic for the website.

The two principles that I used was on graphics and text. I left the background very simple since the fonts for the text were changed to match the image on top. I also made sure that the text was not so small or so big to make it easy on the reader's eyes. The alt label was added to the image and it is not distored also.

References:
http://www.websitecleanup.com/cleanup.php
http://www.w3.org