I’ve been redesigning my website and I have a few questions as the next iteration of it nears completion.
To bring you up to speed, I designed the entire site in Photoshop, switched to image ready and sliced it up making a table, and then spit out the final html. I did some other things, but the point is that my site is just a bunch of images, there is no text! I ask this because I’m trying to figure if file size is ok. The first version consisted of roughly 45 images (buttons, logos, etc) and weighed in at about 135kb. The redesign is physcially bigger, with a few more buttons, which after slicing up generates about 75 images and is about 230kb.
The redesign is actually simpler with solid websafe colors behind the button lettering, instead of what is there now, and I was actually surprised that the file size was larger then the current site.
I could only find some crappy sites with outdated info, telling me about this new technology called DSL and such. Anyone have some advice that would be helpful? I figure a quarter of a meg for a website seems pretty svelt, am I correct?
Lastly, I opened my site, and opened CNN.com, and according to the task manager, CNN was hogging more k.
I mean, it does depend a bit on who your target audience is. If you figure they’re all going to be folks on a college campus or somewhere else where they’re guaranteed to have high speed access, then it’s no biggie. But, if people are going to access this from home, 230k is still too large, especially if people are in a rural area where they are less likely to have the option for DSL even if they can afford it.
So, it all depends. My general rule of thumb is to keep most pages under 50 or 60 k if I can. For the homepage this is more important. If you can draw someone in with your homepage they might be more willing to wait through longer page loads later on. But, if I’m sitting around waiting to even see the opening page of your site, I might not even bother to see the thing all the way through.
[QUOTE=LionelHutz405]
You can get some idea of the speed it will display here: Web Page Analyzer
Ah nice, thanks.
OK
Yeah, to be honest I wasn’t too concerned about it because I assumed that size of things wasn’t as important as it was a few years back with broadband being so common now. I don’t even think a single friend of mine uses dialup anymore. I’m more a graphic designer then a website guy, and I wanted a nice flashy interface that would retain the formatting perfectly, but without spending eons optimizing it. Simply put I’m going for style of substance, but of course I don’t want it to be horribly bloated or anything.
Your page contains no DOCTYPE. For all intents and purposes, your page is invalid.
An entire web page full of images and no real text is very user unfriendly. Granted, it is an “artsy” web site, however, anyone visiting it with a disability will never be able to use it. There are no ALT attributes for your images, no alternative method to “view” content, and the code itself is non standard.
This is going to sound really stupid, but, how big of a problem is that? Am I really alienating many people, or is the “artsy” cost acceptable? I’m content with my current website, by the new one is busting 220k which seems a bit plump, even for me.
Are you intending for people to find your website through search engines? Because an image-only format isn’t going to do well there - most of the popular search engines look for content (i.e., text), and robots won’t spider your links.
Personally, I’d probably leave without seeing most of the website (even though I’m on very fast broadband), simply because the artsy fonts are way too hard to read. That’s on a 17" monitor running 1152x864 resolution.
I find image websites to be much harder to modify and maintain, but then I do mostly low-graphic web applications and I’m no expert in Photoshop. YMMV.
I placed meta tags in most of the html headers, is that good enough?
To be honest I’ve debated back and forth on the fonts, but I’ve gotten a zillion compliments on it, so I kept them as they were.
Surprisingly enough, mine is very easy, the “main” area is 440 x 360 pixels, so I just make a new image that size, give it the correct background color, and bang, it fits right in.
I’m slowly coming to the realization that I may have give things more thought.
No, it’s not. Meta tags are generally ignored now by search engines, or have very little relevance. What’s much more important is how the text content (and text inside images doesn’t count) relates to the title tag, other text within the site, etc. There are other things somewhat outside your control that also have high importance (such as link popularity), but right now your site is very search unfriendly.
There are several other reasons already mentioned why image-only sites are not a good idea. I’d think about them. Most web-surfers are now conditioned and expect easily legible fonts for information pages, and even though your friends say “cool font” most regular surfers will say “that’s too hard to read”.
Now, if all you want is to show off stuff to friends who know your name/URL already, and like arty-ness, no biggie. But if you want to start getting a larger audience, search friendliness and web standards are well worth considering.
Another thing you don’t seem to have considered is how you’re going to handle pages whose content extends beyond the dimension constraints you currently have. Are you going to struggle to always make sure that you don’t have copy longer than X lines long?
On the plus side, you’ve got more graphic creativity in your index finger than I have in my whole body. It’s not a bad design at all, it’s the implementation of it you may want to rethink.
I think its mostly fine the way it is except for the center text bit, which is made up of images. I’d replace that whole section with an iframe and throw in some transparency or do up one of those custom scrollbar styles (sorry, can’t find any good examples right now - and these still technically violate standard Windows usage). And of course, the images would be replaced by real text.
I am curious how you did that background image though…care to tell?
Very cool looking, however, it will never be picked up by search engines. Google for example relies on content and link popularity for placements; right now you have none, and even if CNN, BBC and Slashdot and 100 other big profile sites place links to your site on their front page you will simply be ignored because their bot won’t know *what * your site is about.
But if it is an underground thing and you don’t mind about search engines, or people with dial-up, then go ahead.
Can’t I also “embed” the font in the website so you download it with the page? Then I wouldn’t need to make the buttons images.
Yeah, this was pretty much where I was at, but I’ve wanted to expand it out. I am working on a new version that is physically bigger but I supposed to be slightly leaner then what’s currently up. I’ve gotten the new one down to 145k from 230, but 145k still seems kinda big.
I figured I’d keep the content always within 440 x 360. If I needed more space, I’d add another subpage, like what I did with my downloads.
Only problem I’m worried about with a transparancy is that in my mind I do the text and image as one thing together. I’m not sure how I would go about retaining the formatting. Good points though.
How about at my splash page I do the high bandwidth / low bandwidth deal?
For the high, I could have something like I have now, and for the low, I could make something sweet and simple. It would be more work for me keeping them synchronized, but I don’t mind. Also, the simple site would be search engine friendly, as I would make it mostly text. Seems like most of the things we’ve addressed would be solved.
I am already doing that as I have two versions of my site in different languages under different domains but with the same content. As my sites approach 600 pages each (without the forum) I can assure you it is a bitch to keep two sites. In my case I have no other choice, but you should avoid it like the plague if you have any intention to develop your site to more than 10 pages. IMHO and all that.
BTW, about that image you found in Google, it IS secured by copyright. All of them are. Copyright is inherent to the creation of the work of art, regardless of the existance of registration. As a general rule request permition to use any image or text that is not your own. I get mighty pissed when I see my pictures used without my permission, and have gone as far as threatening legal action (a local chain of restaurants and a cooking magazines here used my picture without my permission, people were fired).
The only thing I update at the moment with any frequency is the front “news” page. The only other thing I update (about once a month) is the downloads, when I add some new songs. To be honest, I wouldn’t even sweat them being identical. I plan to get the content up, and leave them both pretty much static, except for the news pages. I’ll take your warning to heart, but aside of the synch issues, would you suggest the dual site route?
Didn’t know this, thanks. I’ll make every effort to get that out of there as fast as I can.
