By: Christopher S L Heng, thesitewizard.com
If your site has been around for a while, you'd probably
have been visited by the "Web Design Police"
(people who have a lot of time on their hands). In
fact, depending on your site, you might have been
visited by different branches of these people, both
advocating opposite policies. I recently received
an email from one of my visitors who had apparently
been "helped" by some of these people, and
thought that an article on two of the myths of web
design is appropriate.
1. The Myth of "Content is King, No
Animation/Sound/Java/etc"
The adage that "Content is King" applies
to all websites, and I am not disputing that. It is
also true that when you add sound, animation, Java
applets and lots of graphics, your web page takes
a long time to load, and some of your visitors may
not bother to wait for it to load; they'll just go
away.
However, putting those two together does not actually
mean that all pages with animation, sound and applets
are necessarily bad. The trick is to know when they're
appropriate and to make the download speed as fast
as it is reasonably possible under the circumstances.
I will mention a few ways of reducing your graphics
and animation file sizes later in this article.
When is it appropriate? Sometimes applets are needed
for some sort of processing - for example, the Sesame
Street website has a Java applet that shows Elmo (a
Sesame Street character) dancing, and the child using
it can use the mouse pointer to "tickle"
Elmo and he'll respond according to where he is tickled.
The applet takes forever to load on a 56K modem, but
you cannot say that it is out of place: the site caters
to young children who are there to play. In this case,
the applet is an appropriate solution. Likewise, animation
and sound might be appropriate for sites that feature
online comics, online gaming, etc.
In fact, if yours is a website that sells website
design services, that is, you want people to pay you
to design their website, it is in your interest not
to make your site too plain. Many potential customers
see your site as an example of what their site can
become. There's no point claiming "Content is
King" at this time - they won't be around long
enough to hear your claim. Such sites need a certain
amount of colour, graphics, etc, although of course
making it take too long to load would also be a deterrent
to your potential clients.
Like all things, how you design your site depends
on your topic and your target audience. Keep that
cardinal rule in mind and you'll be fine.
2. The Myth of "Good Web Design is in
the Graphics"
On the other end of the scale are the people who
believe a good website must have much colour, graphics,
animation and sound. You might meet them, for example,
in the form of newcomers or pundits who either do
not have much real world web experience or who only
surf on T1 connections.
My first encounter with such people came in the form
of an old friend who exhibited his personal website
proudly to me. At the centre of his home page was
a large animated graphic that was a few hundred kilobytes
in size. That graphic had little function on that
page - it did not provide any informative value: it
was neither a logo, nor was it a photo of himself,
or an image map, or anything at all. It was purely
decorative. At that time (many years ago), I was using
a 14.4K modem and that page took ages to load.
Now don't get me wrong. Decorative graphics on a
page are fine. They make a page more pleasant to look
at, and hence more likely to be read. But you should
at least make them as small as possible. While I'm
hesitant to give a hard and fast rule about how big
such graphics should be, a decorative graphic that
is a few hundred kilobytes in size is definitely too
big to be tolerated.
3. Some Page Design Tips
If your concern is that your page should look good
without being too slow to load, here are a few commonly
used tricks that you may want to consider:
Do not put too much text in one big block. Separate
them out into paragraph and put white space between
paragraphs. This makes your text look more readable.
Like coloured pages? That's okay, but in general,
if the readability of your text is important to you,
a white background with black text works best.
If you must have a coloured background, make sure
you try out your page by viewing it in resolutions
like 256 colours to see whether the page looks alright.
A coloured page that looks fine on your 32 bit colour
resolution system may have dithering that makes your
text difficult to read on lesser settings.
If you check the websites of big companies (Microsoft,
Yahoo, etc), you will find that they still prefer
a white background with black text for their main
text. These companies probably have more resources
for testing the usability of their website than you
have, so it may not be wise to scoff at their design
too quickly.
Reduce the size of the individual graphics
files on your pages by using the following methods:
Reduce the number of colours in the graphic
Reduce the size of the image, if possible
In animations, reduce the number of frames
In animations, don't duplicate the background in every
frame; make the first frame a background without any
objects that will move, and put all your moving objects
in separate frames with transparent backgrounds.
There are also some free automated GIF reducing services
on the Internet. You can check up our Free Webmaster
Tools page on my other site for some of these: http://www.thefreecountry.com/ecentricity/webmaster.html
A note of caution: the oft-cited cliche that "Content
is King" is not to be lightly reckoned with.
Your site may look beautiful, but it's your content
that saves the day. Few people will return to your
site just to admire your graphics. But they will be
back to read what you have to say.
Happy designing!
About The Author
Copyright 2000 by Christopher S L Heng. All rights
reserved. Get more free tips and articles like this,
on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from
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