Top Ten Ways To Tell If You Have A Sucky Home Page

Compiled and written
by Jeffrey M. Glover

Remember:

It's all in fun!
So relax!

10		Your header picture is over 50K! Not all of us have T1 lines installed, ya know! Keep your pictures down to thumbnails until we care to download the whole thing!

9		You put up a 400K picture of yourself, and you appear in the lower-left 20K! Can you say "CROP"?

8		We can only stomach so many pictures of your pets. "...and this is my cat Fluffy, and this is my dog Fifi, and this is my llama Frumpy, and this is my..."

7		You have a link to the White House! (Courtesy of T. Quinn)

6		Blink. 'nuff said.

5		Ticker Tape Status Bars (JavaScript) It was cool the first time we saw it. See Blink. "We want our Status Line back, dammit!"

4		You use Construction pics on your page. I think we all* know that pages are always under construction!*

3		Your home page consists of a desperate plea for a job. http://www.resume.com/boring.html (Courtesy of P. Fink)

2		You use some crappy 4-bit GIF that looks like a film negative left out in the desert for 5 years. (Courtesy of M. Irwin)

1		You're on your own Hot List!

Why aren't italics on my list of sucky things?

Italics are a great way to enhance a page. Unfortunately, if you don't have your default font installed correctly (usually Times), they can look very sucky!

If your italics looks skewed and difficult to read, then you need to head over to my Top Ten Ways to Improve Your Netscape Browsing Experience and you can learn how to install your fonts correctly so they won't look so sucky!

Why aren't backgrounds on my list of sucky things?

I considered putting them on the list, but I think they are OK as long as you follow a few rules:

Make 'em small (All mine are set on POOREST JPG Quality)

Make 'em light (Make sure the text is readable on it)

Make 'em neato (All mine are unique and created by me personally)

If it's a page that's gonna be accessed once, read, and then never looked at again (like this page, most likely), then go nuts as far as I'm concerned.

But if it's a page that's got information that people are gonna access again & again (like a newsletter), then that neato background you added will get old very quickly.

It's a touchy subject.

If you absolutely hate backgrounds, you can turn off backgrounds in Netscape in Preferences -> Fonts & Colors.

Why aren't non-interlaced GIFs on my page?

Well, mostly cuz I've found people do not know the difference between the GIF compression and JPEG compression. They just automatically assume everyone should be using interlaced GIFs. But those people are sadly misinformed.

General Rules:

JPEG compression should be used for continuous tone images. Photographs mainly. JPEG is a "lossy" compression which means it alters the data of your image to achieve optimal compression. Continuous tone images can often be compressed smaller than GIF images and they look better compressed as JPEG.

GIF compression should be used for line-art images. Screen shots & drawings, mostly. GIF compression uses a repeat-packing algorithm which does not alter the data of your image. Unfortunately if you use it for continuous tone images, you won't get near the tonal quality that you get out of JPEG. Especially for people with 8-bit (256 color) capabilities.

If you need a transparent background, then you'll need to save it as GIF and use a special program to convert one color to transparent. Because you can only change one color to transparent, it's not possible to create a perfect shadow, that gradually composites into the background image.

These pages are only meant as a guide, not as a Bible. I encourage you to create
your web page however you like, regardless of what some doofus says is "sucky" or "a don't".

Design and content is a matter of your personal taste and style, not someone else's.

Rules are meant to be broken. I should know... I've broken a few of my own!

It's your page. It's your style. It's your web.

FAQ
For My Pages

Go Back to
the Main Menu

Feedback
On My Pages

What's New
On My Pages

If you have a comment or error to report, use this convenient Feedback Form.