Website Analyst Newsletter
Meeting Your Needs With Excellence
Issue 21
August 2001
Editor: Lucian Millis, editor@website-analyst.co.il
Publisher: Website Analyst http://www.website-analyst.co.il/
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IN THIS ISSUE
1. Editor's Note
2. Handy Hints for Web Designers by Manas Tungare
3. Information Design - Web Usability - User Experience
4. List Management
5. Contact Information
1. Editor's Note
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2. Handy Hints for Web Designers by Manas Tungare
Web Designing is as easy as 1-2-3, claim some of the software
tools on the market that "generate" your pages for you.
Unfortunately, many web designers today have fallen prey to
this marketing gimmick - and the results are obvious. Every
now and then, one comes across a website that looks good with
a particular browser and a particular screen-resolution; but
view it with a different browser, and you can’t even read the
plain text on the page. Worse still, given the number of
operating systems that are used by netizens worldwide, these
pages will never be seen properly by more than a half of the
intended surfers.
Now let’s assume that this web page belongs to a site that
sells stuff online. The very fact that half the users cannot
even see the page, translates into losses worth half the
amount straightaway (perhaps, even more!) I guess that makes
a good case for the raison d'etre of this article!
Web Designing is, in my opinion, a cocktail of creative skills
and technical prowess – and one is no less important than
the other.
In the following lines, I have jotted down a few points that
I noticed during my online journeys, important from the point
of view of web designers. Some of them may be taken with a
pinch of salt; for it is not possible to please everyone
everytime. But most of them are simple enough to be used as a
rule of thumb.
1. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. A picture
file, alas, is also almost as big. Images, no doubt, enhance
the look of a page, but it is not advisable to go overboard
in stuffing your page with a truckload of images. Most
net-surfers use a dial-up connection, and the average time to
load a page should be no longer than 5 seconds. If it’s longer,
the surfer will most probably click away elsewhere. So, within
this time, all the images on a page must be loaded as well.
So, as a rough yardstick, keep the aggregate page size less
than 30k.
Another important point to note is that each file on the page
requires a separate HTTP request to the server. So a lot of
small images - even if they do not add up to a lot in terms
of bytes - will slow down the loading a lot.
Even when you must use images for navigation, please give a
second thought to the users who will not be seeing those
jazzy, fantastic and truly amazing buttons that you spent
hours to design. Yes, I’m talking of the ALT text attribute
of the IMG tag. Do not forget to provide an Alternate Text
for each image that you use for navigation. (It may be left
blank for certain images that are purely for aesthetic
reasons, but let that be an exception, rather than the rule.)
Though not obviously apparent, ALT text can help such users
immensely.
Modern browsers offer users a choice to turn off images. This
gives an idea of how troublesome the unwanted images could be.
A couple of more attributes that make your pages load faster
are the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. Without these, the
browser must wait for the image to download since it cannot
know how much space to leave for them!
2. Navigability and functionality come before artistic
excellence. It is no use making your site a masterpiece of
art if users cannot navigate around it - even after they reach
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 unless your
mouse moves over an image, you have no idea where that link
might take you. Only when the mouse hovers do you see the
actual link. This is cumbersome because users need to move
their mouse all over the place to find out which part is a
link and which is not.
4. Follow the K.I.S.S. principle: Keep it simple, stupid!
5. Next is a very important practical suggestion: whenever
your whole page is within a TABLE, the page cannot render
(i.e., the page does not show on the screen) unless the entire
table is downloaded. You might have noticed this on several
websites, when there is no activity for a long time, and
suddenly the entire page is visible.
Hence, to avoid such a situation, what you should do is this:
Split the table up into two tables one below the other, and
let the top one be a short table that displays just the page
header and a few navigation links.
So now, immediately upon downloading this part of the page,
users can see the page header – and this prepares them for the
long wait ahead, as well as keeps them from leaving your site
to go to other sites, in case of a slow connection.
6. The ongoing browser wars have left only one casualty –
the user.
As a word of caution, stay away from all browser-specific
functions. Because if a certain feature is supported by one
browser, it will most definitely not be supported by another.
Where you must use such features, it should not hamper the
display of the page in the other browser which does not
support such functionality. In other words, your page should
degrade gracefully.
7. Creating a new browser window should be the authority of
the user only. Do not try to popup new windows to clutter the
user's screen.
All links must open in the same window by default.
An exception, however, may be made for pages containing a
links list. It is convenient in such cases to open links in
another window, so that the user can come back to the links
page easily. Even in such cases, it is advisable to give the
user a prior note that links would open in a new window.
8. Keep in mind the fonts-challenged users too.
The ultra-jazzy "Cloister Black MT Light" font that looks so
amazing on your machine may well be degraded into plain old
Times New Roman on your user’s machine. The reason? He/she
does not have the font installed on his/her machine - and
one thing’s obvious - there’s nothing you can do about the
situation, sitting halfway across the globe from them.
9. Stay clear of out-of-the-way hard-to-find fonts. Use plain
vanilla fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, and Courier.
If need be, make your jazzy fonts into an image and put that
on the page. (and while you’re there, do not forget Tip #1.)
10. A new design trick that is increasingly being used on the
web has caught my fancy: It is a very functional navigation
bar that guides you across all possible paths within the site.
It looks something like this:
Home > Section > Subsection > Page
What better than to give your users a handy way of visiting
just about any other page on your own site, and informing
them where they are!
11. Another new trend on the web is not all that inviting -
various vendors come up with "revolutionary plug-ins" and
undoubtedly, most amateur web designers jump up to spruce
up their pages using them. The reality is that most people
won’t have them installed, and wouldn't care about it anyway.
Come to think of it, have you seen plug-ins on any of the
most popular sites, including Yahoo.com, Amazon.com or
Google.com? It's simply not the best thing to do. Mention must
be made here of Macromedia’s Shockwave Flash plug-in, which
has now made its way onto most computers today, and thus
presents no harm in using vector animation on your site.
12. Java is yet another often-misused technology on webpages.
Use Java as a utilitarian programming language, not as a
graphics front-end for your photos/images. There are various
things you can do with Java; that does not mean you should do
all of them. Java applets are known to run slower, so users
experience a certain sluggishness in performance. And worse
still, Java has been known to crash certain browsers. This is
not something everyone likes, especially if it is done for
the sole purpose of showing a set of images in a slideshow!
The moral: Use it, but with discretion.
13. Never underestimate the importance of those META tags.
They can make all the difference between your users coming to
your site and going to your competitor's – just because they
couldn't find yours. Search Engines heavily rely upon the
Keywords and Description Meta tags to populate their search
database. And once again, use discretion in writing these.
Including a huge number of keywords for the same page can
spell trouble. The description should be a small, meaningful
summary of the whole page that makes sense even when seen
out-of-context of the webpage itself, say, in a listing of
search engine results.
14. And the final point that summarizes all the points so
forth: Write for all browsers, all resolutions, and all
color-depths.
If you show people pages that look best with their own browser
and their own resolution, that makes them feel "at home", and
you get a better response. Compare this with a website that
proclaims "Viewed best with Browser X at a resolution of
1024x768." I'll give you a choice between two options when
you see such a page: download the suggested browser (which
might well be over 50 Megs), then go get a new monitor that
supports the high-resolution, and then adjust your screen
setting so you get the perfect picture. Or simply click away
to another site. Which do you prefer?
The web waits for no one. And furthermore, the user is king.
Try your best to keep the user happy. And to keep all users
happy. For, a good website is like a good storefront - it can
mean all the difference between a casual surfer and a serious
customer.
3. Information Design - Web Usability - User Experience
The LucDesk is a place to find links to articles I consider
noteworthy on other sites. Send contributions and suggestions
to mailto:editor@website-analyst.co.il
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