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Simply cruise the Web — especially areas with lots of
personal pages, like the GeoCities site or AOL's Hometown area — and you can
find many examples of badly designed pages. But what is it that makes these
pages bad? Of the many design mistakes you can make, three are common among new
Web page creators: slow-loading pages, ugly color combinations, and small text.
Slow-loading pages
This is the No. 1 bane of Web page design, whether
amateur or professional. People think they're designing a magazine and throw
large, uncompressed graphics around, several per page. Then they add cute little
design elements, each of which has to be sent as a separate file by the Web
server. As each of the different elements comes in, the page design shifts and
shimmies in a manner guaranteed to cause motion sickness. When a page of yours
loads slowly, it's usually due to the fact you are committing one of two major
errors.
- Error # 1 involves a lack of care with one or two individual graphics. By
keeping these graphics files large, you doom the whole page to slow loading.
- Error #2 is to use graphics in a profligate manner in general. Highly
designed pages can have lots of little graphical elements that cause many
separate file transfers as the page loads. Unless the page is carefully
designed, the page actually shifts a bit as each graphic comes in. The overall
effect can be quite disconcerting.
Graphics not only can cause your page to load slowly —
they also take a long time to create, tend to have copyright problems, and
present challenging design and page layout issues. Keep the use of graphics on
your page simple until you get really good at designing with graphics, or until
you can get help from someone who has that talent themselves.
Ugly color combinations
Many Web page publishers don't much care if the color
combinations they use are attractive or not. Others care, but can't critically
appraise their own work and see how ugly and/or difficult to use the result is.
You may understand that certain color combinations can
be ugly, but maybe it seems odd for us to say that bad colors can lead to
difficult-to-use pages. The reason is that on the Web, color identifies
hyperlinks, with unused links and recently used links having different colors.
The standard colors for links are blue for unvisited links and purple for
visited links. If you change these colors, your visitors have trouble
identifying which links they've visited and which links they haven't.
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If you simply must change the link colors, try
to use color combinations that are analogous to the standard ones — a
lighter, eye-catching color for unvisited links, and a dull color for
visited ones. This is at least similar, conceptually, to the standard
colors. Then test the design on a few people and see if they can quickly
figure out which links are which. |
Now, back to ugly. Just
because the Web makes it possible to use various color combinations doesn't mean
you should do so. Black text on a white or off-white background is what people
are used to, and is always the safest choice. And with this combination, the
standard link colors show up really well. You can use a graphical bar at some
consistent location on the page to give your Web pages a colorful, graphical
look without sacrificing predictability and readability within the body of each
page.
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A few other color
combinations work fairly well, but many don't. Remember also that some users
run their monitors in 256-color mode and that only 216 colors out of the 256
— the Web-safe color palette — are the same on PCs and Macs. So a color
combination that looks good on your system may look poor on a system with
fewer colors; likewise, colors that look good on a PC may not look so hot on
a Mac. |
Small text (And large text, too)
A common mistake people make
is to use small text on their Web pages. Small text does look kind of cool, and
it allows you to pack in a lot of information. Because of these temptations,
even large Web sites, such as early versions of the Microsoft site, have made
this mistake. The trouble is that small text becomes very small text when
viewed on a high-resolution monitor. So small, in fact, that many of the people
who visit your Web site may not be able to easily read the text on your page.
Less common, but equally
harmful, is text that's too large. You don't need to design Web pages with text
that's readable from 20 feet away. Really. (People with true vision problems
switch Windows and/or their browser to display text in extra-large size, so they
have a way to read text that starts out normal size.) This looks awful,
especially when viewed on a system with relatively low resolution, such as 800 x
600 resolution.
Both of these problems are
made worse by the increasing tendency to embed much of a site's text in graphic
images. This text always has a consistent look, because it is treated by the
browser as a graphic image, but that look can easily be too small or large. When
you save text as image files, the text can't be resized by the browser to
accommodate different browser settings. So the user can't fix any problems
they're having with graphically displayed text.
So what's "normal-size"
text? Glad you asked. There's not one exact normal size, but there's a normal
range. To find it, match the text size in your Web page to the text size in a
few Web pages you like. Then ask several people — not all younger and hawk-eyed,
nor all older and less visually acute — to tell you if they can easily read the
text while sitting comfortably a couple of feet from the computer. If not, fix
the problem before it becomes a burden for your Web site visitors.
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