Great Graphics Make A Great Site? Not Necessarily.


There's nothing more frustrating than linking to a site - and then having to wait for two minutes while the graphics download and appear.


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Great Graphics Make A Great Site? Not Necessarily.

There’s nothing more frustrating than linking to a site - and then having to wait for two minutes while the graphics download and appear; although modem connections become more powerful, this is still a common complaint about the Internet. For this reason, even if your page has gorgeous, state-of-art graphics, you should consider scaling them down. No matter how striking they are, animations and images that don’t load are worse than useless, and may actually drive potential customers away from your site. So keep it simple, and keep it clean.

First, the ground rules: limit the size of each graphic element to 10 or 12K, and the total amount of graphics on any given page to 20K. You should also keep a tight lid on your color palettes, since the fewer colors you use in your graphics, the smaller their files will be. When it comes to bullets, points, and navigational buttons, you should stick to only one color, if it’s at all possible. If you plan to incorporate photographs, you should use an image-processing program such as Adobe PhotoShop, which can convert the picture to a GIF; in this case, reduce your palette to 6 colors, and save it as an 8-bit adaptive. Also try shrinking the physical size of the photo; using thumbnail pictures is a smart way of getting the most bang for your buck, memory-wise.

If all these rules seem a little bit severe, it may be worth having two versions of your site, one loaded with graphics, and the other possibly just text-only, aimed at the poor saps with prehistoric browsers. If you opt for this, offer visitors a choice at your home page, by explaining the difference and then letting them pick. The easiest way to create a duplicate version of your site is just to copy its .html files from your current directory to a new directory. If you don’t change the file names, all the links will remain intact. So long as you don’t copy the graphic files, the web browser won’t find them, and will default to the alternate text description.

Of course, you’ll need to make sure that your graphic links are properly replaced by text links, so text-only users will still have the complete run of your site. While you’re at it, run through your site in text-only mode. You might be surprised at how imposing and non-descriptive it is, if it wasn’t originally designed to accommodate text-only visitors.