When Good Sites Go Bad...

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Howard (Howie) Merrill is the Master of the Web Manor website, as well as the author of the wonderful newsletter The Funnies.  Comments, questions, and anything else about Howie's Corner should be sent to Howie.

When Good Sites Go Bad...

Many of us spend a great deal of time working the layout and contents of our websites. Trying to make a website perform well, eye-pleasing, interesting, etc, is a time-consuming and rather tedious task. We ensure the links work, the images are optimized, the colors are right, spell check, and do our best to make the site readable, grammatically correct, and comprehensive. Upon completing all this work, we decide to add something like a counter, guestbook, or a script or two. Most people get these add-ons from external sources. I am no different. I had a guestbook, a statistics method, some cgi scripts, some JavaScripts, all free from various sources. At any given time, one or more of the pages of my site would cease to load, get a JavaScript error, or some other nasty undesirable occurrence. This is due to the fact that I am relying on some other server, some other webmaster, basically some external, outside of my control source for contents for MY SITE!!!.

There is nothing wrong with the utilization of external sources. In fact, the majority of sites use them. You must keep in mind that the usage of these external contents leaves you open to a broken site, most of the time, without you even being aware of it!

I tend to spot check my site quite often. I get, on occasion, an e-mail from a kind soul informing me that something is broken on my site. As we all are too aware, the web browsing public has a very short attention span. Any delay in your page can cause loss of visitors. Keep these facts in mind when you design your site.

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Last Revised: 02/03/2001