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CSS Print Media Tutorial
The power of print + CSS So you've made yourself a cutting edge web page. What next ? Well maybe you want your visitors to be able to print pages in a certain style. Heavy graphical content can be removed, background colour changed and navigation...
DVD Burning: Is it Legal?
DVD Burning: Is it Legal? When it comes to DVD burning, many people have questions and concerns. Some people may be performing illegal acts without realizing it. Other people may be afraid of doing something that is against the law. So we are going...
Hints All the Way
One of the best ways to make your site easier to use is to
provide hints to your visitors everywhere you can. You might
think that sounds simple enough, but the amount of time required
to do it and the number of things to consider puts a lot of...
How To Build Your Own Web Site For Your Online Home Business
Most everyone will agree, if you are going to do business online, you need your own web site. It can be a mini-site or a full blown multi-page site. These days, maybe you just need a blog as a web site. Find out what you need to know to build your...
Web Design Using a CMS
Web Design Using a CMS
There has been a big craze lately, everybody wants their site as
a database driven site or Content Management System (CMS). There
are many advantages to using a CMS over ordinary static page
site, the main on is...
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Size Matters, It's True what they say!
Yes, it really does and the smaller your webpage the better it
is.
Size is an area where people can lose focus when they are
concentrating on the look and branding of their website.
In print and other forms of media, size and complexity of images
is not necessarily related to the viability of the advertising
itself.
But in the ether of the Internet, the time for a page to load is
incredibly important to the chances of it being viewed.
Soon, when Broadband is everywhere, the threshold of what is
considered allowable will increase, but till that time, size
will be a very important factor.
8 seconds is all you have got.
You need to grab the visitor by the horns, tell them they need
what you have got and give it to them! There is no time to stuff
around impressing them with your "wizzy this" and "wazzy that"
If your site is there to sell something, then that is what you
need to focus on.
People talk about "Content being king" and this is very true. If
your content is text, then you get a lot of bang for your buck,
if it is rich media like photos, video, and audio then you may
need to be a little clever in the way you present this so as to
not push people away purely because of the time they had to wait
to see it.
On a dialup connection, 8 seconds gets you about 30 kb, that is
usually enough for a few pictures and some text. If you are
clever enough about it, you can make it work for you.
Here are some ideas to think about when you are looking to
reduce the size of your pages.
· Use an image optimizer. It is surprising to see how many
images are far larger than they need to be. This is often due to
the fact that some software provide the ability to resize
pictures, but do not actually change the file size or download
time. The time taken to create thumbnails is well worth it in
the long run.
· Choose the right format for your images. JPG and GIF are the
two usual suspects for formatting images. JPG's are great for
photos and places with gradients. While GIF's are ideal for
cartoon style line graphics and logos.
· Use text wherever possible, while a picture may say a thousand
words, if you only need ten, do it with words.
· Rollovers - those cool looking menus where they change
appearance when you move your mouse over them. So, for ten menu
items, you are actually loading twenty pictures...it really adds
up.
· Use CSS, Cascading Style Sheets are a great tool for reducing
the time to load a page. Instead of formatting each piece of
text explicitly, using style sheets you can use style names
instead which are much shorter and take less space.
· Don't use FrontPage...OK this might be a gross
Six Years Of Change
<em>Day to Day</em> premiered on NPR on July 28, 2003. As you can imagine, quite a few things have changed since then, including our military presence in Iraq, housing prices, gas prices ... and the list goes on.
Behind The Scenes At 'Day To Day'
There's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that goes into making a daily radio program. A lot of it is not pretty, but sometimes it's pretty funny. Senior producer Steve Proffitt put together a little mash-up that reveals a lot of things we do that listeners don't get to hear.
Looking Forward: How Will Lives Change?
Joel Kotkin, who studies metropolitan development and urban planning, talks about how people might be arranging their lives in the coming five years. And author Jamais Cascio outlines where technology might take us.
generalisation,
but the number of FrontPage sites I have had to rescue and the
time taken to do it shows there are much better things out there
that produce much better pages.
· Check it out for yourself - use any of the good tools out
there to test the speed of your page (just remember, their time
are from their server to your site and not necessarily from
where you are). Do a search on "web page optimization".
So with your current 8-second window, you have to get your
message across. These things I have mentioned will all help in
the fight against the bloated page, but you need to be vigilant
to make sure that you can achieve the look you want within the
time you have.
Your Audience
The audience is also vital to this calculation. Some audiences
will happily wait to see the frilly bits float across the screen
or the Flash intro load.
Especially in visual arts such as Museums, Art Galleries, Movies
and Games, these extras are an expectation of the audience. They
want you to wow them and that if you don't they will go on to
the next cab off the rank.
But if your business is a little more ordinary, then time is of
the essence. Consider how many other place of business there are
out there like yours? Maybe not exactly the same, as yours is
special, but similar enough to the web surfer where if you can't
deliver what they want in the shortest time possible, they will
move on.
The browsers "BACK" button is your enemy. The more people click
this once they land on your site, the less effective your site
is being.
One good thing to look for is the time people spend on your
site. If you use AWstats (a free webstats program) it will show
you the percentage of people leaving after different durations.
If you have a high percentage of people leaving in the 0-30
seconds column, you may need to look at that page and see what
is happening. Possibly, they just couldn't wait long enough.
While on the subject of Webstats, Google Analytics gives
some great information about your visitors activities on your
website. While you may not be able to sign up yet (at the time
of writing, the signups had been temporarily disabled), keep an
eye on it as it will be of great use to all webmasters and
website owners to keep a good eye on their prized internet
possession.
So keep it short and sweet, it is how you use it that matters!
About the author:
Steven Gardner runs DeepWeb
Web Design, a web design business that caters to all
businesses looking to get an edge with their presence on the
Web, providing web design, maintenance and consulting services.
You can find him at www.deepweb.co.nz
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