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This might look cool, but there's a few things wrong here. Following is a discussion of what mistakes were made in laying out this page, and possible solutions: |
- This background graphic is 48k in size. Things are getting better, but not everyone has a 56k modem and 128mb of ram! People can get turned off by long and laborious downloads. Then, if you add a banner (and we do recommend banner exchange participation) the problem is exacerbated further. Recent surveys conducted by Jayde.com and others have shown that browsers are spending an average of just over one minute on pages visited.
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- There's just a little too much color here. Some people may find this page difficult to read or "busy". A good rule to follow is:
If you find that you are spending a lot of time altering the font color or style just to make it show up on your background, it's time to reconsider your design choice.
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- Depending on the browser you are now viewing this page with, you may notice that the font scrolls over the background graphic creating a sort of 3-D effect. To accomplish this, I used the
BGPROPERTIES="fixed" in my BODY tag. So my BODY tag looks like BODY BACKGROUND="blsm.gif" BGPROPERTIES="fixed". This can save a good deal of download time by not allowing the graphic to "tile" repeatedly to fill the browser window, and this was accomplished without the use of complicated JAVA Applets or DHTML programming. But look back at the first four words of this block of text: "Depending on the browser". Our testing has shown that not all browsers recognize this command. Secondly, if you can see the 3-D effect, try resizing your browser a couple of times. It is easy to see why this is probably not the best graphic to use for this purpose. Add to that the fact that MSIE lets the browser resize the font at will (VIEW|FONTS), monitor controls can be reset, and resolution set at a level less than that which the designer is using, and you've come up a whole host of reasons why this is not a good design choice.
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- An unfortunate number of people will look at this design aesthetic and immediately think "DRUGS!". This brings us to one of the oldest rules of design, art, & advertising:
Know Your Audience!
This sort of thing might not be bad for a cartoonist's or a rock band's website, but don't expect it to help sell Investment Services.
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- In conclusion, I don't want to fall back on clichés like "Less is...", but I will say that I have often done what I feel to be my best work when I was trying to make the most out of limited resources. Take a look at some old magazines, and look at some of the work that was created before there were computers, and Babelizers and HiJaak Express and Corel Draw and PhotoShop. The best software will never make up for a lack of imagination or taste.
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