Definition of a 4th generation web site

4th generation web sites have all the elements of a 3rd generation web site along with the following:

1. The proper use of markup (HTML): only structural tags in the HTML, use of CSS, proper use of structural tags in the layout (H tag order in a document for example).
2. Respect to usability in web site design: using proven layouts
3. Search engine aware web pages and web site.
4. Well structured - easily updateable.
5. Automatically printable with CSS media type linked CSS files.

What hardware do you need to start designing web pages and web sites

You don't need any special hardware to create web pages. Just a standard computer and an Internet connection so that you can put (upload) your websites onto the web - this assuming you want to get your websites on the web.

Fortunately web design is not like 3D animation, where you need the latest and most powerful PC's to be competitive. These days home computers are so fast that even three, four-year-old PC's are more than enough to handle all your web design needs. If you're not convinced and you still want to spend a couple of thousand on a new PC, give me a call! :)

Before you go out and spend your cash consider these points:

HTML pages are just simple text documents:

Web design is more or less about creating HTML pages. Html pages are just simple text documents that use special 'key-words' called tags. To make a long story short, simple text documents are so easy to create and manipulate that hand-held devices can easily view them! Oh, and just in case it's not clear, even the most powerful handheld PDA's (personal digital assistant) only have a small fraction of the power/speed of the slowest of desktop computers or laptops.

Ok, some of you are crying that web pages are not just about text and HTML. There are images that have to be created and inserted into your pages, and we all know that image manipulation can really take a lot of juice (computer power). This is true in print work (where images have to be much heavier) but it doesn't apply to web design because images used in web pages (Gif's, Jpeg's and PNG's) have to be made really light so that they don't take forever to download. In a nutshell, what this all means is that images only need a lot of juice if they are heavy images.

For those graphic designers out there who know print, images used in web pages (and all screen graphics by the way) need to be reduced to a PPI (DPI) of 72 to 76, a big contrast to the usual 300 DPI when working in the print world!

What do I mean when I say images have to be 'light'?

Now that you are getting into the web game, you are going to hear a few things over and over again. One of these is the expression: making your images and your pages 'light'. You will hear people say: 'keep your web pages light ...' or 'keep your images light ...'

What the nerds are talking about is the size of the images in terms of file size; we are not talking about how bright an image is.

So how big (or better yet how small) do images and pages have to be, to be considered 'light'?

The last several years of web experience has shown that if people have to wait more than 10 seconds to see your page, you can kiss most of your traffic goodbye. High speed Internet access is growing, but sadly still too many people are using dial-up connections.

Last stat I heard puts the number of people on (slow) dial-up connection at about 60%. This number of course will vary from place to place, but the bottom line is that you should expect to have many surfers hitting your web pages at 56k or less.

56k is the speed of the fastest of dial-up modems you can expect, and 56k modems download at a speed of about 5.6 kilobytes per second. With this in mind, and the 10-second rule I just mentioned above, you can see that shooting to create pages under 60k (kilobytes) is a good idea.

The best way to keep your web pages 'light': image optimization.

The heaviest aspects of most web pages are the images. Following the old 80/20 rule we should concentrate on making our images as light as possible without making them look ugly. The process of 'lightening-up' an image, is commonly referred to as 'optimization'.

How to optimize your images

Just about all the image editing programs out there (programs like Adobe Photoshop, Xara, Macromedia Fireworks) have the built in capability to output/create images that are as light as possible. These programs have special export filters that are designed to produce web-optimized images. When you start using image-editing software (and you will, if you are designing web pages) you will find that the process is pretty painless, thought you will probably have to tweak things as you go along.

A little common sense can speed up your pages

Besides using these tools, there is no substitute for common sense approach; you may one day have to ask yourself if you really need that image that takes up half the page! Big pictures that take up a lot of space on the page will typically be pretty heavy...

Remember that unless you are National Geographic, * Walt Disney or Playboy, people are probably less interested in nice graphics/photos and more interested in the information/service your web site provides.

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