Morning Glory® InterActive is an independent Internet Web Site Design Firm located in Somerset, NJ. We provide general internet consulting for small and medium sized businesses. We specialize in creating web content for our clients. We also can teach you to enhance and maintain your own web pages. Many firms have staff that would be quite capable of maintaining a web site if given a starting point, some tools and a little instruction. We are general internet experts, and can do almost anything you need done. This can be as simple as installing and configuring software at your site or as complicated as a full e-commerce web site. We know HTML, JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, CGI, PERL, C, PHP, MySQL, ASP, etc. We are very good at what we do.....

"Here at Morning Glory® , we are committed to educating our clients
in the use of the internet as a business tool."

1) 'Keep it small'. Many browsers display the size of the images as they are being downloaded. Many folks have slow modems, bad phone connections, or slow service providers that cause slow download speeds. If it looks like a page will take more than 20-30 seconds to download, some people will hit their stop button. Keep the volume of graphics small. This page has about 18K of HTML text, no background image, a 5K flower image, and two very small icons (one line and one bullet, which are reused). Altogether less than 25K. There is another 40K representing three JAVA applets that get downloaded if the browser is JAVA compatible. (The scroller, the clock and the banner). We wanted to show off our geewhiz cutting edge technology. Perhaps more than 50 to 70K is too much. Put any heavy graphics on secondary pages and let people know the size of "big" pages.

2) 'Put some text first'. It is good to put at least a paragraph of text before any graphical image. This is so that the folks accessing your page have some text to read while they are waiting for the images to download. A good feature of some browsers (including Microsoft's 'Internet Explorer') is to display all text before going after graphics, but some (including Netscape) do not.

3) 'Be friendly'. This means be warm, welcoming and friendly. Depending on your business, this can be done with either a folksy tone or a more professional spin.

4) 'Be informative'. Make your page interesting to read. This section of our page is oriented towards fulfilling this guideline. People accessing your page want to know more about the product you are offering. But they also want information about how to make a choice regarding your product. Give them some information that establishes your credentials as experts at what you do. Not all of the information should be purely about your pitch for your services.

5) 'Register with all of the search engines'. Many people use the various search engines to find web pages. Make sure that you (or perhaps we here at Morning Glory) register your web page with the search engines. We know which ones are most used and which ones are just looking to get your email address to send spam. We recommend registering with the fifteen major search engines only. This is an essential aspect of creating a presence on the web. We know how to influence the search engines to get better results for you.

6) 'Use keywords'. We usually put a section called 'keywords' in a very small font at the bottom of the main page. Be sure that any phrase that someone might use trying to find a business like yours is on your page. This is so that someone using a search engine (to search for a product or service which you sell) will find your page. We suggest going overboard in creating this list of keywords. .

7) 'Use META TAGS'. META TAGS are hidden descriptive fields within the header of your web page. The two most significant are for keywords and a description. Search engines use these with great weight when deciding which pages to return as a match for a search. What choices made here greatly affect how often your page is visited from a search engine site.

8) 'Web browser software varies a lot'. Your page will look tremendously different to different people. The word tremendous is not used lightly here. The three main variables are: the software used to browse your page, the settings on color and fonts used for that software, and the monitor used to view the page and (for windows) what color mode the monitor is using. Some pages are hard to read in 256 color mode. Some browsers display all pages with a white background and black text. Laptops often use smaller 640x480 screens. Some browsers don't even display images. Be aware that a given page may appear tremendously different to different people.

9) 'Considering trademarking your domain name'. Courts have recently decided that no one actually owns a domain name. I find this very troubling, and I hope that legislation is passed to change that. You CAN protect your domain name by getting the federal trademark on the name. A suggestion for a trademark attorney is Dan Kirshner, an internet savvy intellectual property attorney who keeps track of these matters.

10) 'Use solid white backgrounds'. Almost all mainstream web sites use solid white backgrounds. The reason is that it is just too hard to predict how anything else will look on all browsers.