19.1. Remembering What Everyone Forgets When you're cranking out pages at blinding speed, it's easy to forget some of the less obvious (but no less important) details, the ones that ooze professionalism, both for the site and its designer. Nobody's blaming anybody here. You were supposed to focus on the big-picture items: content, style, navigation, and usability. It's understandable that the little things may have slipped through the cracks here and there. But now that you've achieved the first finished, working version of your site, the big stuff is behind you. You can afford to turn those considerable powers of observation to the microscopic level. Now is an excellent time to go back through your pages with an eye for the following points:
Do all your pages have a title? -
Point your browser to your favorite search engine, and search for "Untitled Document." At last count, Google returned about eleven million results. That's eleven million web pages where the designer forgot to go back and supply a page title in the Title field at the top of the document window. After all the work that went into crafting your pages, don't you think they deserve to be in some other (more relevant) set of search results?
Are all your page titles unique? -
In a template-based web site, it's easy to put a generic page title in the template document. When you create new pages based on the template, it's equally easy to forget to change or modify the generic title that the template document supplies. Make sure that all your page titles accurately and specifically describe the content of their pages.
Have you checked spelling? -
Dreamweaver comes with a spell checker, so the only reason that Dreamweaver designers don't check spelling is because they don't feel like it. Don't make this silly mistake. For the love of Pete, think of all the poorly written, poorly spelled content you got from the marketing department! Load up your pages, and choose Text  Check Spelling from the main menu. | HOTKEY | Press Shift-F7 to check spelling. |
Have you supplied alternate text for all images that convey information? -
Alternate text is the best way to make your images useful for those who can't see them. Using alternate text consistently and correctly also improves the ranking of your pages in search engines, and it makes your pages easier for the search engines to index. You can safely omit alternate text for purely decorative images like the little connector graphics at the bottom of your nav bar and the spacer images in your layout, but any image that contributes to the content on your site needs a textual description.
Have you set the tab order for selectable elements? -
Selectable elements include all the interactive goodies on your page: your links, nav-bar buttons, clickable images, image-map regions, form fields, and Flash movies. Make sure you give them logical tab-index values, especially if you built your design with tables. A good way to check this is to view a page in a live browser window and cycle through the elements with the Tab key. If the items aren't selected in a sensible order, you definitely need to go back and tab index them. To set the tab index for an element, select it in the document window and go to the Tag Chooser (also known as the Attributes panel). Look under the Accessibility category, and type a value in the tabindex field.
Have you deleted style rules that you're no longer using? -
Carrying obsolete style rules around in your external CSS file isn't that big a deal, unless you have so many of them that it adds noticeable amounts of time to the download. That said, if you don't need these style rules, you don't need them, so you might as well get rid of them. Go to the CSS Styles panel, select your unused styles, and then click the trashcan icon at the bottom of the panel.
Are all the images, movies, scripts, and stylesheets for your site located somewhere in your local root folder? -
This is crucial. If they aren't (or if they are, but you placed the ones from some other location onto your pages instead of the ones from your local root folder), these items won't show up on your published pages. A quick way to check this is to search the source code for file:// using Dreamweaver's Find and Replace feature. Choose Edit Find And Replace, and set the search to look in the source code of the entire local site. Now, in Dreamweaver, you can set the scope of the search to the page text only, ignoring the underlying codea handy feature, but not in this case. For this operation to work correctly, you have to include the code in the search, so in the Find And Replace dialog box, be sure to choose Source Code from the Search menu.
Have you cleared the cell heights of your layout tables? -
This one is optional. It appeals to those who don't like bits of extraneous HTML floating around their pages. Way back in Chapter 9, when you first built your tables-based layout, this humble tome advised you not to worry so much about the heights of the cells, because the browser determines the proper heights based on the content that goes into the cells. Now that your site is finished, the arbitrary height values that you originally specified are no longer valid. Leaving them alone isn't harming anything, but if you don't need them anymore, and if they're not accurate, why keep them around? You can simply get rid of them if you choose. To do this, open up the template document, and select each table of the layout in turn. For each, choose Modify  Table Clear Cell Heights from the main menu. When youre done, save the template, and write your changes to all the pages of your site.
| TIP | If you decide to get rid of table attributes, clear the cell heights only, not the widths. The widths are far more important to the proper layout of your page, so be careful that you don't choose Modify Table Clear Cell Widths from the main menu by mistake. |
| TECHTALK | Meta tags provide high-level information about the content of a web page, mostly for the benefit of search engines. |
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