Sunday, January 8, 2012

Exactly what Any Net Designer needs To Know

By Dan Eduard White


Internet Designing is really as simple as 1-2-3, declare a number of the computer software resources around the marketplace that "produce" your pages to suit your needs. The fact is, countless internet developers today have fallen prey to this advertising gimmick - and also the results are obvious. Each sometimes, one comes across a web site that looks excellent with a particular browser and a specific screen-resolution; but view it with a different browser, and you can not even read the plain text to the page. Worse nonetheless, given the number of operating systems which are employed by netizens worldwide, these pages will by no means be noticed properly by a lot more when compared to a half from the intended surfers.

Now let's presume that this particular web page is associated with a site that markets things on the web. The extremely truth that fifty percent the users can not even see the web page, translates into losses worth fifty percent the amount straightaway (perhaps, even more!) I assume that makes a good case for the raison d'tre of this write-up! Web Designing is, in my view, a cocktail of creative expertise & technical prowess - and 1 is no less critical than the other.

In the following lines, I have jotted down several points that I observed in the course of my own on the web journeys, important from the particular point of view of internet developers. Some of them may possibly be taken having a pinch of salt; because of it is extremely hard to please everybody everytime. Yet a lot of them are easy enough to be used as a guide.

1.An image, it is said, may be worth a thousand words. An image file, alas, is also almost as big. Pictures, simply no question, improve the particular look of a web page, however it is not necessarily a good idea to go overboard in filling the page with a truckload of images. Most net-surfers make use of a dial-up connection, and also the average time for you to load a web page should not be longer than 5 seconds. If it's longer, the surfer will in all likelihood click away elsewhere. So, within this time, all the images on a page should be loaded too. So, as a rough yardstick, maintain the aggregate page size less than 30k.

Another essential indicate note is that each and every file to the page needs a separate HTTP request for the server. So a lot of small images - even if they do not add up to a great deal in terms of bytes - will slow up the loading a whole lot.

Even though you must use images for navigation, please give a second thought for the users who will not be seeing those jazzy, fantastic & truly amazing buttons that you spent hours to design. Yes, I'm talking from the ALT text attribute from the IMG tag. Don't forget to offer another Text for every image that you apply for navigation. (It may be left blank for certain images which are purely for aesthetic reasons, but let that be an exception, as opposed to the rule.) Though not obviously apparent, ALT text can help such users immensely.

A couple of much more attributes that make your website load faster are the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. Without these, the browser must wait for a image to download because it can not know how significantly space to leave for them!

2. Navigability & functionality come before artistic excellence. It is no use making your site a masterpiece of art if users can't navigate around it - despite they attain the main page, they have no clue as to how to go where they want to go.

3.Especially common, is a kind of navigation that some people call Mystery Meat Navigation. That means, that except if your mouse moves over an image, you've got no idea where that link usually takes you. Only when the mouse hovers would you start to see the actual link. This really is cumbersome because users must move their mouse all over the place to find out which part is a link and which is not.

4. Stuck to the basic K.I.S.S. principle: Keep it straightforward, stupid!

5. Next is a extremely important practical suggestion: whenever your whole web page is a TABLE, the page can't render (i.e., the page does not show on the screen) unless the entire table is downloaded. You might have noticed this on numerous websites, when there is no activity for a long time, and suddenly the entire web page is visible. Hence, to avoid such a situation, what you should do is this: Split the table up into two tables 1 below the other, and let the top one be a short table that displays just the web page header and several navigation links. So now, immediately upon downloading this part from the web page, users can see the page header - and this prepares them for the long wait ahead, too as keeps them from leaving your web site to go to other sites, in case of a slow connection.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment