Bad Web Design: Graphics ProblemsWritten by Richard Lowe
I know you like to put graphics on your page. There is little better than a site which has been done by a professional graphics designer. The perfect balance between graphics, color, fonts, photos and layout is rare and a wonder to behold.On other hand, a site with bad graphics or some obvious blunders can be agonizing and even painful to look at. Here are some of more common errors. Large Graphics Large graphics have their place on web. Some sites give away massive numbers of wallpaper images, which by definition are very large. In fact, I know of a site which offers over a thousand Tomb Raider wallpapers that is very good. What you want to avoid is using large graphics on your main pages. Instead, you can use a technique such as showing thumbnail images or links to larger graphics. Thus, those people who want large graphics can get them, while those who do not are not forced to wait for them to load. The Tomb Raider site solved this problem by including 100 very small (32 x 32 pixel) thumbnails on a page. Clicking on an image displays larger wall wallpaper. Improperly Optimized Graphics All of common graphics formats (GIF, PNG and JPG) allow for compression of various kinds. One common error is to not take advantage of this compression. For example, you can cut down number of colors in a GIF image, which makes it smaller. Or you can increase loss percentage in a JPG, substantially reducing it's size.
| | Bad Web Design: Looong PagesWritten by Richard Lowe
One of sins committed by many inexperienced webmasters is creation of very long pages. I've seen this most often on sites created at universities, although it can happen anywhere.It's very annoying to run into these amateur sites (although sometimes they look very professional). On one occasion I found a site with a 15 megabyte page! No graphics at all either - just one long, long, long page. I remember surfing to site (it was a list of jokes) and I just waited and waited. I could see from my internet throughput meter that massive amounts of data was being received so I waited ... but it was ridiculous! I'm very glad that I have a 1.7mb connection - otherwise I would hit top button long before this page was done loading. Another place that I've seen this is when someone simply posts some large text files to internet. They don't even bother to convert file to HTML - just link to text file directly. While this is a fast way to get something onto web, it is a sign of a true internet amateur. Okay, here's problems with this practice. - The majority of people on internet use normal 28.8 or slower modem connections. If you have a page which requires over a minute to download on this kind of connection you've almost guaranteed that your visitors will go somewhere else. - Search engine spiders do not like long documents. Many of them will stop after 100kb or so - it's anyone's guess if spider actually looks at a page that is a megabyte in length. - Many usability studies have proven over and over that it is very uncommon for visitors to scroll down screen much (and often not at all). They will scroll if they read something of interest, but they will not scroll very far. Most people tend to prefer clicking on links to scrolling down page.
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