Datasheet

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Chapter 1: Web Publishing Basics
But, like the Fabrik Web page, your home page also should help people who
seek a quick “hit” of information; they’re more likely to come back later if you
don’t waste their time during their first visit.
Think twice about download times
Putting lots of graphics in your pages is time-intensive for you because creat-
ing or finding good graphics and placing them appropriately in your Web
page can take a great deal of time and effort. Graphics are also time-intensive
for those who surf your site because they can take a long time to download.
Many people are ignoring this concern these days because they (and many of
their users) are on broadband, so even large images load quickly. There are
three problems with making this assumption:
 Much broadband service has inconsistencies and hiccups that slow
speeds at particular times, making that large file download crawl.
 Even a “fast” download can never be fast enough. A 3-second wait is still
annoying, and unnecessarily so if trimming the image size could have
taken the wait entirely away.
 There are still some dialup users out there, and a graphic, say, 1 MB in
size, can take several minutes to download on a dialup connection. If
you impose this wait, you can unknowingly drive some of your users
nuts and put them off your site entirely.
So plan to use spot graphics (small images that download quickly) at first.
Think twice before creating large clickable image maps or attractive opening
graphics like those you find on the sites of large companies, such as General
Motors or Apple. If you do use an opening graphic, keep the file size under
20 K or so. See Chapters 2 and 5 for details on the efficient use of graphics,
whether they’re design elements on your site or stored photos on Flickr.
There has been a good deal of coverage in the computer press, and even in
mainstream newspapers and news magazines, about ongoing efforts to make
faster access available to ordinary users. But for all the talk about cable
modems, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), and other up-to-date techniques,
nearly half of home users in the United States are still on 56 Kbps or slower
modems — with even more dialup users in most other countries. (Business
users are typically on faster connections.) So ignore the hype — the speed at
which the average person accesses the Web is still moving upward gradually,
not leaping ahead. For now, be conservative in how much data you put in
each page, and test the download times of your pages over a modem-based
connection before you publish them.
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