 .WEB SITE TUNING |
| You should often return to your web site with a fresh and critical look at its performance and relevance. But before you do this, revisit your original marketing and development plans and double check that the mission has not changed, your target audience has not changed and that your message and positioning has not changed. Modify the plans and strategies if necessary, then with a critical, open mind, surf your entire web site. After that, take a look at the sites of competitors or those that have similar missions to yours.
Now does your site live up to your expectations? |
Site design is a combination of mission, message, art, technology and technique. Management and marketing develop a mission which is carried out by writers and artists who will use appropriate technology to execute the project. This being properly accomplished does not insure that the message is received properly. The element of technique enters the picture.
Technique makes the viewer comfortable with the content. Simply put, does work? Does the content transfer fast enough, look good and is easy to navigate with no dead ends? Here, then, are some ideas on technique. |
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The Technique of Fast Loading |
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| Bandwidth will be a concern for the foreseeable future. The home audience will be mostly using 14.4 kbps and 28.8 kbps modems. Corporate users that have a higher speed pipe to the Internet probably have to share that pipe with many fellow workers. Your content on the server requires server bandwidth to send a file to a user. Therefore, always try to make your content as bandwidth efficient as possible. Even if you can't, there are techniques for giving the viewer early information before the entire page is transferred.
Here are some basic tips you can use to make transfer-efficient content: |
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| Clean Code | Even the best HTML editors can trip up over creating HTML code, especially with complicated pages. Database templates can also be inefficient. As you browse your site, "view" your document source or frame source using the View menu. Look at the source code with a word processor that can show non-display characters. Are there as many non-display characters such as tabs, returns and spaces? I've seen pages that have MORE non-usable characters than legible ones. This takes up more than twice as long to transfer. Many times a database template will do this.
There are several sites that automatically examine your pages and report coding errors and other important parameters about the health of your page. A good one is Doctor HTML. Doctor HTML will review one page at a time FREE. You can have your entire site reviewed for a fee. One bit of information it returns is the time to transfer your page at various modem speeds. This makes a good barometer to track your progress in making efficient pages. |
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| Not too many image files |
Images make a page look attractive and image buttons, for example, help in navigating. Every graphic is an individual file that requires the browser to look up the file address and the server to establish a connection, retrieve the file, send it to the browser, then close the connection. This is v-e-r-y inefficient and s-l-o-w. You may want to use an alternative such as an image-mapped button bar or buttons arranged in a table using image elements that are common throughout the site (they will remain cached).
Keep in mind that many users with slow access will disable image loading. Therefore, your design has to accommodate text-only navigation. |
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| Still To Come | The Technique of Fast Loading - Clean, snappy compact images - Balancing breadth per page with depth of site - Preloading images - Frames vs tables vs simplicity
The Technique of Utility
The Technique of Looking Good
The Medium is NOT The Message
Quality Control COME BACK AGAIN |
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| Is this information useful to you? Do you need help? |
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