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Graphics and Backgrounds
As you've no doubt noticed, graphics play a large part in the appeal of a site or the lack of it. Graphics designs are as unique as personalities
and it's very difficult to forecast clashes or love affairs. One of the major concerns in website graphical developement, is what the results
will look like on different browsers, platforms and screen sizes. This is difficult to predict in many cases and having no or just simple graphics is
a measure with it's own consequences.
An image is not always viewable, as people can turn off image loading to speed browsing, be blind, or access your site with non-graphical browsers! The W3C have defined new requirement that you add "alt" text for images, so that a text description of the image can replace it on your page, or be read aloud to the blind. This is not without it's own problems, a favourite howler went something like this:
"Our Classrooms and Staff fancy horizontal rule"
More than anything else, wallpaper or backgrounds and text colors are the biggest and most common mistake made by webmasters who assume that everyone will use their
color preferences for text, or have chosen text colors that clash or are nearly invisible against that background. Likewise, a background choice can have bad effects if
the user has changed his standard color settings, or prefers only the default ones. Perhaps they have x-ray vision but many sites are simply unreadable for these reasons.
No doubt, individual monitor settings and room lighting also play a role in these bad decisions. Color is an important psychological tool that should not be abused if one
wants to appeal to a wide audience. Needless to say, too much color can also be a problem.
Colors are best chosen based on the default blue/purple link text colors, against a near-white or dark background, especially where text is involved. Remember too
that wallpaper should always be produced or viewed in 256 color mode to ensure it renders well with few colors! Dynamic HTML allows many new ways of highlighting
and pre-describing special font style, sizes and decorations on certain named parts of documents without having to repeat the instructions for each little part. This
can reduce the size of highly stylized content dramatically.
The most critical factor is also the size of these files, and here, Netmechanic's Free Power Tools Gifbot
can be of great help in speeding up those files, packing them into much less space for you!
Graphics are also strongly influenced by the Content requirements and Navigation systems you plan to use on your site and should be chosen carefully
to avoid having to redesign the site to make changes. Unfortunately the graphic-navigation design template is the backbone of your site. Once the navigation method
has been decided it is very difficult to alter afterwards without a thorough make over. Like houses, a site that is built upon weak foundations, in this case
depending on an adolescent or infant new technology, may require extensive repair when browsers featuring newer standards hit the market!
This consideration is a good reason to have two versions of your site so you can fall back gracefully if problems arise! This is also a good argument
for implimenting a more conservative graphical layout that renders well in both plain and DHTML versions.
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