The Demo Site

Many web designers overlook the importance of color when designing a web site. Color should be one of your first concerns when it comes time to start your web site design. If you don't pay close attention to the colors you chose, your site you will end up either plain and boring or so chaotic it's hard to look at. The color you use should only be chosen after careful consideration.

Unfortunately web browsers can only see 256 colors. Even that number is hindered because all browsers don't share the same 256-color pallet. Currently web browsers only share 216 common colors. When designing key elements in your web site you should stay within the 216-color pallet.

If you go outside the 216 color pallet you start to use colors that do not exist within that browser. The browser has to mix the colors that do not exist. In order for the browser to display the color, it needs to take tiny dots from the colors native to that browser to come up with an approximate color. This is known as dithering. Some displays will distort the tiny dots to the point where the image is so speckled that it does not appear to be a solid color. This makes text very hard to read if it is placed over the dithered color. You should always use a browser safe color when using solid color as a design element. Some of the browser safe colors should be used with caution though.

Most of the eye operations are muscular and just like all other muscles it tires out. I will illustrate with an example. (This is a test I learned about 7 years ago and is very effective to get the point across). This is a simple test that should take only 45 seconds. If you do this short test, you will be better able to understand what I'm about to say. Go to this page and then come back. http://www.designmore.com/ctesta.htm

What did you see when you looked at the white box? Did you see a bluish green color? (If not go back and do the test over). No this is not a trick or hallucination. There is a simple explanation. Without getting too technical, I'll tell you what just happened.

In the back of your eye there is a thin layer of tissue that contains millions of tiny light-sensing nerve cells called rods and cones. Cones respond to specific wavelengths of light. Your eye is filled with color decoding cones. When you looked at the red box the cones that detect the red wavelength become tired and fatigued. When this happens the opposite cones in your eye start to kick in. Hence the bluish green color you saw. Now that you know there is a scientific reason behind eye fatigue you should apply it to your web site.

I'm sure you have you noticed that caution signs are usually yellow. Pure yellow strains your eye more than any other color because of that, it is the first color your eye will fix on. Using these colors (I still advise you to use it sparingly) for banners and advertisements will receive more attention from the viewer's eye. Once the visitor comes to your site there is really no reason you should irritate the visitor with bright colors. You have done a good job if they are viewing your site.

You should use yellow and red colors sparingly in your web site itself. Only use them in areas where you want the visitor to focus on. Do not make large parts of your web site with bright color. It might get your visitors attention but they will either consciously or subconsciously notice their eyes getting fatigued. This will make them not want to look at your web site for long periods of time. There are enough reasons why a visitor would leave your web site. You don't need to add to that list by using irritating color.

What does all this mean?

How can I get it under 50K? 30K?

Use design more, graphics less. For a web page to be successful it needs to download quickly and look good. Here is the dilemma download quick or look good? Instead of designing graphics and taking pictures and turning them into jpgs to make your web page look good, try using color schemes. Use cell colors to make boarders. Use the negative space on your web site. What is not there is just as important as what is there. Remember sometimes less is more. When in doubt think of a typical visitor coming to your web page. Would that extra graphic sell them or keep them coming back again and again. If the answer is yes, by all means keep it. If the answer is "well maybe" or "it just looks good there", yank it. Viewers will appreciate not waiting more then they have to. The web is here to make our life easier not to sit in front of a screen waiting for heavy web pages to download.

Now let's assume that this web page belongs to a site that sells stuff online. The very fact that half the users cannot even see the page, translates into losses worth half the amount straightaway (perhaps, even more!) I guess that makes a good case for the raison d'être of this article! Web Designing is, in my opinion, a cocktail of creative skills & technical prowess – and one is no less important than the other.

In the following lines, I have jotted down a few points that I noticed during my online journeys, important from the point of view of web designers. Some of them may be taken with a pinch of salt; for it is not possible to please everyone everytime. But most of them are simple enough to be used as a rule of thumb.

1. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. A picture file, alas, is also almost as big. Images, no doubt, enhance the look of a page, but it is not advisable to go overboard in stuffing your page with a truckload of images. Most net-surfers use a dial-up connection, and the average time to load a page should be no longer than 5 seconds. If it's longer, the surfer will most probably click away elsewhere. So, within this time, all the images on a page must be loaded as well. So, as a rough yardstick, keep the aggregate page size less than 30k.

   Another important point to note is that each file on the page requires a separate HTTP request to the server. So a lot of small images - even if they do not add up to a lot in terms of bytes - will slow down the loading a lot.

   Even when you must use images for navigation, please give a second thought to the users who will not be seeing those jazzy, fantastic & truly amazing buttons that you spent hours to design. Yes, I'm talking of the ALT text attribute of the IMG tag. Do not forget to provide an Alternate Text for each image that you use for navigation. (It may be left blank for certain images that are purely for aesthetic reasons, but let that be an exception, rather than the rule.) Though not obviously apparent, ALT text can help such users immensely.

   Modern browsers offer users a choice to turn off images. This gives an idea of how troublesome the unwanted images could be.

   A couple of more attributes that make your pages load faster are the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. Without these, the browser must wait for the image to download since it cannot know how much space to leave for them!

2. Navigability & functionality come before artistic excellence. It is no use making your site a masterpiece of art if users cannot navigate around it - even after they reach the main page, they have no clue as to how to go where they want to go.

3. Especially common, is a kind of navigation that some people call Mystery Meat Navigation. That means, that unless your mouse moves over an image, you have no idea where that link might take you. Only when the mouse hovers do you see the actual link. This is cumbersome because users need to move their mouse all over the place to find out which part is a link and which is not.

4. Follow the K.I.S.S. principle: Keep it simple, stupid!

5. Next is a very important practical suggestion: whenever your whole page is within a TABLE, the page cannot render (i.e., the page does not show on the screen) unless the entire table is downloaded. You might have noticed this on several websites, when there is no activity for a long time, and suddenly the entire page is visible. Hence, to avoid such a situation, what you should do is this: Split the table up into two tables one below the other, and let the top one be a short table that displays just the page header and a few navigation links. So now, immediately upon downloading this part of the page, users can see the page header – and this prepares them for the long wait ahead, as well as keeps them from leaving your site to go to other sites, in case of a slow connection.

6. The ongoing browser wars have left only one casualty – the user. As a word of caution, stay away from all browser-specific functions. Because if a certain feature is supported by one browser, it will most definitely not be supported by another. Where you must use such features, it should not hamper the display of the page in the other browser which does not support such functionality. In other words, your page should degrade gracefully.

7. Creating a new browser window should be the authority of the user only. Do not try to popup new windows to clutter the user's screen. All links must open in the same window by default. An exception, however, may be made for pages containing a links list. It is convenient in such cases to open links in another window, so that the user can come back to the links page easily. Even in such cases, it is advisable to give the user a prior note that links would open in a new window.

8. Keep in mind the fonts-challenged users too. The ultra-jazzy "Cloister Black MT Light" font that looks so amazing on your machine may well be degraded into plain old Times New Roman on your user's machine. The reason? He/she does not have the font installed on his/her machine - and one thing's obvious - there's nothing you can do about the situation, sitting halfway across the globe from them.

9. Stay clear of out-of-the-way hard-to-find fonts. Use plain vanilla fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, and Courier. If need be, make your jazzy fonts into an image and put that on the page. (and while you're there, do not forget Tip #1.)

10. A new design trick that is increasingly being used on the web has caught my fancy: It is a very functional navigation bar that guides you across all possible paths within the site. It looks something like this:

    Home > Section > Subsection > Page

    What better than to give your users a handy way of visiting just about any other page on your own site, and informing them where they are!

11. Another new trend on the web is not all that inviting - various vendors come up with "revolutionary plug-ins" and undoubtedly, most amateur web designers jump up to spruce up their pages using them. The reality is that most people won't have them installed, and wouldn't care about it anyway. Come to think of it, have you seen plug-ins on any of the most popular sites, including Yahoo.com, Amazon.com or Google.com? It's simply not the best thing to do. Mention must be made here of Macromedia's Shockwave Flash plug-in, which has now made its way onto most computers today, and thus presents no harm in using vector animation on your site.

12. Java is yet another often-misused technology on webpages. Use Java as a utilitarian programming language, not as a graphics front-end for your photos/images. There are various things you can do with Java; that does not mean you should do all of them. Java applets are known to run slower, so users experience a certain sluggishness in performance. And worse still, Java has been known to crash certain browsers. This is not something everyone likes, especially if it is done for the sole purpose of showing a set of images in a slideshow!

    The moral: Use it, but with discretion.

13. Never underestimate the importance of those META tags. They can make all the difference between your users coming to your site and going to your competitor's – just because they couldn't find yours. Search Engines heavily rely upon the Keywords & Description Meta tags to populate their search database. And once again, use discretion in writing these. Including a huge number of keywords for the same page can spell trouble. The description should be a small, meaningful summary of the whole page that makes sense even when seen out-of-context of the webpage itself, say, in a listing of search engine results.

14. And the final point that summarizes all the points so forth: Write for all browsers, all resolutions, and all color-depths. If you show people pages that look best with their own browser and their own resolution, that makes them feel "at home", and you get a better response. Compare this with a website that proclaims "Viewed best with Browser X at a resolution of 1024x768." I'll give you a choice between two options when you see such a page: download the suggested browser (which might well be over 50 Megs), then go get a new monitor that supports the high-resolution, and then adjust your screen setting so you get the perfect picture. Or simply click away to another site. Which do you prefer?

The web waits for no one. And furthermore, the user is king. Try your best to keep the user happy. And to keep all users happy. For, a good website is like a good storefront - it can mean all the difference between a casual surfer and a serious customer.