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PREVIOUS PAGE • SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER • CLIENT LOGIN The great (graphics) wastelandIn 1961, Federal Communications Commission member Newton Minow addressed the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, DC. What he said infuriated broadcasters, but it happened to be true. Minow said, "When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when the station goes on the air ... and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station goes off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland." Those words, with only minor changes, can easily be applied today to the World Wide Web. Allow me to paraphrase Minow: When the Web is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your computer and visit Web sites randomly for a day. I assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. The most serious problem is the overuse of graphics, javascript applets (termed "craplets" by John Dvorak), and animations. A close second is the use of self-serving fluff in place of useful information. The problemToo many Web site designers confuse flash with substance. Too many Web site designers forget that most people who use the Web are still doing so with a standard modem. Too many Web site designers seem to belong to the TONE school — "technique only, nothing else." I like pretty pictures and graphic effects as much as anyone else. In fact, I’m one of those people who buy computer games just to observe the programming. Computer games quickly become boring to me because I’m not particularly good at solving maze-type puzzles and shoot-em-up games don’t really appeal to me. But game programmers are on the leading edge. They show where standard computer programs and operating system interfaces are going. Unfortunately, much of what can be done on a "local machine" can’t be done over the Internet because the connection is so slow. When Web site designers get too far ahead of the available hardware, their designs fail. The solutionIf you’re planning to use a Web site to communicate with business people, it’s important to make a design that’s appropriate. Everybody is impatient. Attention spans are said to be measured in nanoseconds, which is only a bit of an overstatement. This is particularly true for business-to-business sites. The business person who comes to your site probably wants information, not entertainment. They don’t want to spend time waiting for a "cute" site to load. They don’t want fluff. So the rules are simple:
Every graphic on your Web site should earn its position — just like a football player might earn a starting position. If the graphic adds nothing that’s essential to your site, it shouldn’t be there. Period. Are you using a graphic instead of text anywhere? Some purists recommend eliminating all such graphics. I take a more pragmatic view. Just as food prepared without spices is bland, a Web site with no graphics is too plain. To take the food analogy further, just as an over-spiced meal is unappetizing, so is a too-complex Web site unappealing. How to reduce load timeExamine every image on your site with an eye to making the file size smaller. Can you reduce the quality of a JPG image a bit to conserve load time? Experiment with various quality settings because some images can accept a lot of degradation without showing it. Conversely, other images can accept very little degradation before the quality becomes unacceptable. This, clearly, involves judgment and decisions. Many GIF images that have 256-color pallets (or 216-color web-safe pallets) could have the pallet reduced to 128 colors, 64 colors, or 32 colors without harming the image. More judgment calls! There simply aren’t any rules. Obtaining the right look and a reasonable load time involves balancing many considerations. Should you use a table to align text and graphic elements? This will make your page look better, but large tables can increase load times. Fortunately, this is easily fixed: Breaking one large table into several smaller tables keeps the look you want and reduces the apparent load time. Aha! Just as "image is reality," your Web site’s apparent load time its load time in the eyes of those who visit your Web site. If that’s too Zen-like, consider this: If the first part of a page loads in 5 seconds, the user thinks the page has loaded in 5 seconds. The remainder of the page may take an additional 30 seconds to load, but the person who’s looking at the site can begin reading in 5 seconds. That’s the apparent load time. Smoke and mirrors? You bet! A good magician will misdirect your attention so that you don’t see the dirty work. A good Web site does the same thing. Improvements? Not anytime soon!This isn’t going to change anytime soon. You’ve heard about cable modems, ISDN, the Internet by satellite, and the coming ADSL connections. These will help, but they won’t make today’s dreams possible. I have a cable modem. When my path to a Web site is good and when the Web site isn’t overloaded, a well-designed page pops up almost instantly. But sites with too many graphics, video, audio, and animations are still depressingly slow. No matter how fast the connection between my computer and my Internet service provider, the data from the remote Web site still has to travel over the Internet "backbone" and that backbone was never designed with graphics, video, sound, and animation in mind. Even the coming "Internet II" (when and if it becomes available to the general public) won’t solve the problem. Streaming video, audio, and such are still novelties. Use them at your own peril. For today, tomorrow, and the foreseeable future, if your goal is communication, keep it simple — and fast. |
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