In general, the more code you put into making the page look a certain way, the more time a user spends wondering why the page hasn’t loaded yet. For example, the store locator page that started me on this month’s topic was packed with large menus carefully rendered in alternating color schemes. Every menu had a substantial chunk of extra code to change the way it looked, which I suppose someone thought made the Web site seem exciting and daring. The net result was a painful display of angry fruit salad.
Exercise caution when coding for effect. Remember the price you’ll pay in download time and ask yourself whether the effect is really worth it. —Peter Seebach —My not-so-invisible enemy: Page bloat is the visible culprit behind long load times (IBM DeveloperWorks)
Great article. I flip back and forth between viewing pages on my fast work connection and my painfully slow home modem. The sheer amount of crap that some designers put on their sites is astounding.
While I don’t discourage my students from making their websites look good, since I’m a writing teacher, I make sure that students understand that the time they put into fiddling with color schemes and layouts will not help them if their writing doesn’t meet the course requirements.
Good web pages need good design, of course — you can’t completely separate form and content. (Well, with CSS you can, but that’s a technical, rather than aesthetic, distinction.)
I’m one of those luddites who still uses a 56K modem. I just can’t justify the extra $50 a month for broadband. Sure it would be nice to have, but that $50 a month buys a lot of other cool stuff. It all boils down to what you use the web for. I mainly read news and discussion sites, which are text based. If I were a hardcore online game, I’d NEED broadband. Since I’m not, I can get by with my $10 a month dialup plan. I know I’m strange, but I can’t be the only one with this attitude. Don’t underestiamte the power of the cheap modem users!
That’s a good point, Dr. Arnzen. Many people are zooming by in the digital age with DSL and such, but it’s always nice for web authors to keep those people, like Dr. Jerz and my parents, in the back of their head. I feel like it should be a goal of design to balance form and function; otherwise, you lose those people to bandwidth.
You can do loads of cool things with Flash and Shockwave, but if you pollute the entire site with heavy graphics moving in all directions, you’ve lost a person who may not have DSL. It’s hard, though to resist the urge to eschew those people and make a stellar and interactive design.
Some sites are better for expressing art in the form of digital image, sound and video. But, it’s like watching TV. Sometimes it’s even hard to get people to actually read a National Geographic magazine because the pictures are spectacular. I guess it depends on what you plan to communicate. Graphics and video often take the focus off the content.
However–adding to Dr. Jerz–it is somewhat harder, I find, to develop your web writing skills enough to get people interested based on pure content alone, than to attract people with killer graphics and Flash videos.
But, as I said before, “We look at the asthetic value of a page. If it looks like a block of words randomly thrown here and there, if it doesn’t have a pretty font, if it has a… (blasphemous) horizontal scrollbar, we skip over it.”
(http://blogs.setonhill.edu/EvanReynolds/archives/2005_06.html#a009749)
The issue is getting the balance right.
There are some web resources that wouldn’t make sense as text-only pages, such as comic strips or HomestarRunner.com. But yesterday, my wife sent me to the website for Kennywood (a local theme park) because she wanted to enter a contest to name the park’s new ride. There was no textual description of the ride, and no static pictures to download. The only way you could get any information about the ride was to watch a movie. Of course the “contest” is simply an excuse to get people to look at the website, but really, it was annoying that the park didn’t provide any alternative method.
When the text loads first, and the pretty pictures interpixellate themselves into higher resolution in the background, that’s fine with me. But when the designer of a bloated site doesn’t offer a well-designed low-res mode, then you know someone’s ego has trampled common sense.
True, Cable is advancing highspeed modem use in most households, but what about those who live in the country and cable is unavailable? People like my girlfriend, Heather, are stuck with dial-up because her family does not live in the city. Differences between 56K, broadband, and dial-up certainly add a new twist to using the Internet in long-distance relationships. Just some thoughts for consideration.
I used to be a HTML-only groupie, too, hating all lag time and wishing that all websites were Lynx-compatable. It makes more logical sense for web pages to be text-based, too. But getting broadband “upgraded” my worldview and I’m more open-minded now than ever before. Would you agree that we’re now officially a “Post-56K” culture in America? I see highspeed (non-DSL) modems at Goodwill for less than $5, which tells me they’re a dying breed. Cable is mainlining America with high-speed access and the consumer-base wants their web to be like their TV (which has as many pros as cons, in my view).