Functionality Vs. DesignWritten by Thomas Jenkins
The question faced by all web designers at sometime during a project is: How much functionality should I sacrifice for stylish design? I know that I have played this balancing game many times. However there is a way to have both in healthy servings, in other words, there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. `UserLovely.com beckons next functionality revolution` The popularisation of .jpeg and .gif formats in web design was arguably one of earliest and greatest functionality revolutions, allowing us to fill our pages with 10 times images we could before. Now UserLovely.com beckons next revolution for good design and functionality on web. What is it and how much does it cost? Is response given by most, including myself when I
| | @kins Diet for Web Pages Written by Thomas Jenkins
Do your visitors have to wait an age before they can view any of content on your site? The problem is most people won’t “wait an age”, they will simply click off your site and if you are trying to run a business then this can be disastrous! Good web design is a balancing act between content rich, graphically pleasing sites and loading times. As internet connections get faster we cannot become complacent and think that we can stop worrying about loading times, because people will expect loading times to be even quicker as they upgrade their internet connection and may click off your site after a shorter than usual period of waiting. “I recommend putting your site on @kins Diet!” Okay, so we have established how important a quick loading site is, but how can we shorten lengthy loading times. Well, I recommend putting your site on @kins Diet! Remove all excess; lengthy video clips, background music and unnecessarily bulky images. As with any good diet, you shouldn’t good cold turkey and omit all these things - just as our body needs a range of nutrients, a good web page needs a range of media. Long pages of endless text may load quickly, but they don’t exactly speak good web design. “Communicate with your visitors!” Another rule of @kins diet is that you should spread out media in your site, don’t eat all your junk food ration in one day i.e. don’t put all largest images on one page and if you do feel like you need to do this, then don’t, again DO NOT, put all these files on index page. Put them in a gallery page (Top Tip: use thumbnail images in galleries), that has a warning of lengthy loading times. Communicate
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