Make your site quick to load!Written by Michael Kralj
The time it takes to load your site can make or break a visitor’s first impression of your site. If your site takes too long to load, visitor will click “Stop” or “Back” and leave your web site. If you are a business and offering people important information, it is critical to have a nice design, with a quick load time.You may want to check out load time of your page, to indeed see if your site loads quick enough for average user. A great site tool can be found at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ where you are able to enter your site and it displays a report on time it takes to load your site on different connections, in addition to tips to decrease load time. Upon doing a speed test, if your first page takes a great time to load in visitor’s browser, it is in best interest to do some redesigning to decrease load time and increase number of visitors that will not click back on browser. We must remember that not everyone is running on DSL or Cable modem. Many users still dial up using a 56K connection. As web designers and site maintainers, we want to ensure our site’s load quickly, as to not lose potential visitors to your site. Images, Sounds & Animations are major menaces to download time. While these add nicely to a site, they may take up a lot of time to load. If you may avoid large sized files, please do. Many images may be optimized to look same, however taking up less space, and download more quickly. Many image editors such as Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro can perform these tasks.
| | Browser "Safe" FontsWritten by Shruti Gupta
Browser "Safe" Fonts By Shruti GuptaFonts make a big difference to look and experience of website. Usage of fonts requires sense of aesthetics and discretion. We have liberty to use any font we want in an image but when we specify fonts for text on a web page, we need to ensure that we use only 'browser safe" fonts. Browsers support TrueType fonts and all operating systems come with sets of standard TrueType fonts that have been preinstalled. These preinstalled TrueType fonts are what we can say are "browser safe" fonts. My recommendation is to specify at least three fonts from following list in stylesheet. Out of three fonts specified, make sure that at least one of them is available in Macintosh and one for Windows. Also, please remember that multi-word font names should be in quotes (example "Times New Roman"). So, here is a list of fonts that are preinstalled in Windows and Macintosh computers as they come out of box. Windows OS •Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) •Arial Black •Comic Sans (Bold) •Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) •Franklin Gothic Medium (Italic) – as of Windows XP •Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) •Impact •Lucida Console •Lucida Sans Unicode •Marlett •MS Sans Serif – as of Windows XP •Palatino Linotype (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) •Symbol •Tahoma (Bold) •Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) •Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) •Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) •Webdings Mac OS •American Typewriter (Bold) •Andale Mono – Only installed in OS X if Classic is installed •Apple Chancery
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