Basic Design Issues
Some issues taken from the C/AIM Style Guide:
Bandwidth and Graphics
Large amounts of graphics soak up bandwidth, which is important in terms of both speed and cost when you are linked to the internetvia a telephone line. The aim should be to go for relatively small graphic banners at the top of pages, with hyper-linked lists of text items below.
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"Purely graphic systems for menus and home page navigation in WWW
sites are often functionally impoverished, typically offering only
a fraction of the choices and linkages that might be available if
the same screen area was filled with lists or hyper-linked text"
"Most studies on user response to computing system delays suggest that waiting times longer than about 20 seconds are intolerable in routine, repetitive computing tasks"
Exercise
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- Occasionally a picture is worth a 1000 words. Find two examples of
where a heavy graphic on a Home page is worthwhile in your view.
Check: Record the URLs
There is always a balance between functionality versus graphic impact. Many academics disdain the use of graphics as being 'frivolous', whilst designers and others deeply into Cyberculture would dismiss text-based pages as boring and artistically barren. Whichever your preference, home pages incorporating large graphics will always load more slowly than text-based systems. The slower your modem, the more graphics will be problematic.
One way to minimise the slow-load problem with images is to use compression techniques to keep the byte count down. For example, changing an image from 256 colours to 8 colours can reduce file size enormously and may not reduce final picture quality significantly (especially given the limitations of most computer monitors)
Training report sheet