Spiderific Web Design
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Ian Hess
Why Are Blocky, Heavy Web Designs Always Wrong?
Because broadband use is spreading like wildfire, many Web design professionals, and the companies they advise and represent, are increasingly using more graphics and building front pages loaded full of HTML code. These make for larger files on the Web site server, and guarantee a longer wait for downloads.
Appallingly, even tech sites, like Internet.com, once a mainstay of industry standards, has become so fat and bloated in its code, it takes ages for a 28.8 connection to get a page off of certain areas of that site. For example, it takes me 20-30 seconds to see their Webopedia dictionary's search blank.
There's a different format for building pages that cell phones can see. But what will happen to all these fat sites when we're all carrying crossbred hand held computers? What about business travelers who can only get a thin band connection? Technology keeps getting smaller. So should Web pages.
An excellent Web design professional won't even wonder about such things. True Web design professionals want to catch everyone they can in their Web designs, so they build their Web like a spider. Here's how:
The Unseen Spider Holds the Power!
HTML files should be kept as small as possible. As well, your HTML code should only contain the structure of your Web design, not the formatting. That way, its easier to give your site a whole new look when your Web needs to be remade.
The easiest way to achieve both of these pursuits is to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). These hidden files hold all of the color, font and other formatting directions that control the appearance of your site. This way your HTML doesn't need to repeat formatting tags every time you want to repeat the same look to a title or other structure. Instead, you just reference the CSS sheet. Then its also possible to give your entire site a make-over, just by creating a different look and feel with a different CSS sheet!
Weave a Web of Lines in Your Web Designs
Most folks don't realize that you can achieve amazing graphic effects using just text, and by using lines to divide space and visual impact. A good Web design professional will practice creating interesting pages without using any graphic file images. Instead, much like a spider creating a very powerful image using merely strands, make your own Web design brilliant by dividing spaces and manipulating fonts and colors.
Using CSS, its possible to build a site with buttons, drop down menus, and even mouseovers, without a single graphic image. If you aren't linking cascading style sheets to your HTML pages, then you're Web designs are as weak as a spider's Web hanging from one strand - you're floating in the wind with a lot of weight depending on one technology.
Fly-like Graphics for Impact Web design
Most Web designers use photographs or other complex images in their Web designs. However, the human eye doesn't read graphics like text. We interpret what we see in a complex image, extracting a limited set of elements to understand what we are seeing.
This means a 30k image can be significantly reduced using high contrast, fewer colors, cropping, and sharpening, all which simplify the image. In many ways, an image almost reduced to a symbol of itself can be even more psychologically informative because it emphasizes only the parts you want the viewer to see.
Which tells more of a story, a fly struggling in a Web, or the unmoving, crisp and bloodless corpse of a fly partly framed by the angled corner of two rigid strands of web?
Drain your images of some of their complexity and crop them to frame exactly what you want the graphic to reveal.
