Dillon, Fred, & Bongo watching football.

Many attention-starved web nerds think its a great chance to put a big picture of themselves out there for everyone to waste their time and phone bills downloading . . . or maybe they think the world needs to see their pets or these are a few of my favorite things. This is usually obnoxious or dorky, as with most art forms with no real content. Just because you eat, sleep, and breathe doesn't mean you need to have a web page.

• First of all, HTML is a vehicle for describing the design attributes that the document will have to the browser so that it can understand how to display it. Trust your browser!

• The Netscape default window width is 6.75 inches on a 14 inch monitor or about 9.75 inches on a 17-inch monitor (subject of course to resolution settings), which is exactly the default width of this page within the borders by however long you make it (as a continuous 'story' - though a sequence of 'pages' is more practical because they will load more quickly) .

• If a single document is too lengthy or contains too many 'hyperlinks', it can be unbearably long to load. To be practical, keep pages simple, informative, and not overly-linked to other documents.

• Unless you are providing a catalog format, spread your links out among multiple pages.

• Effective design should be aesthetic, functional, and considerate. Overuse of bandwidth for excessive, gratuitous multimedia elements slows the internet down for everyone.

• Remember that not all monitors are hi-res or even color.
  • Many people have their browser color preferences set to "always use mine" so that their backgrounds will not display your custom color or texture settings.

  • Likewise with text preferences.

  • Also keep in mind that some people turn off 'auto-load images' entirely, preferring the speed of text-only surfing, so try to provide 'ALT' text descriptions for missing images.

• Keep in-line images small (in size and bit depth). Use thumbnails as links to larger size images which can be loaded at the users perogative.

• Make and save images and thumbnails in Photoshop as JPEGs or Indexed-Color GIFs.
  • JPEGS or Progressive JPEGS are usually superior for 24-bit continuous-tone fidelity, with compression and quality varying according to size and readability.

  • GIFs or PhotoGIFs are usually better for line art or more graphic images. Photoshop files exported as 89a Gifs offer the possibilities for 'interlaced' progressive loading and transparent backgrounds. GIFs can also be sequenced (with an application like GIF Builder) to display as animations without requiring any special browser plug-ins.

• If the display of your content depends on browser plug-ins (Shockwave, RealAudio, Speech, QuickTime, QTVR, etc.) provide links to sites where the appropriate plug-ins can be obtained.

• Considerate design perhaps provides alternate page choices to service both 'text-only' and 'media-rich' users.

• Avoid using image map links which could strand the user in a long load period on the way to an unknown location. Describe where the link will lead and possibly the size (k) of the download.