Choosing the right colours
for your site is really important, since it's really the first impression
that visitors to you will get. Lastly, try to use non-colour colours as well, i.e. black and white. These draw attention towards the colours you ARE using, which means you can use colour more sparingly to give greater impact. They are great as background colours too. If you would like to offer us feedback , please email us. Have fun!
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Websites are often deadly
slow to load. Here we're going to tell you some issues pertaining to it.
We'll cover the reasons for a
slow-loading site and what we do about it. |
Why Sites are Slow |
The main reason that sites are slow is that when using a modem, the Internet has a really slow data transfer rate. The "world wide wait" is very unforgiving of sites with a lot of information on. We're not talking about content, we're talking about the size of the files. The main culprits are big
image files. Now big image files in the print world are around 30-100Mb - huge
in other words - but on the web, a big image file is anything over 20Kb. And
it adds up: if you have 5 20Kb image files on your homepage, that's a 100Kb download,
plus the text file with the code. At a transfer rate of, say, 1Kb/second (not
that fast, but not that slow either, in Internet terms), that's getting on for
a minute and a half download time. Sloooow!
(;-0) |
So what can we do? |
It should be obvious by now that the way to get a faster download time is either to have fewer images on the page, or to shrink in file size the ones you have. If you are going to use an image, ask yourself if it really adds something to the page, or is it really unnecessary to the overall effect? Faced with the fact that you have to use the image in your site, there are several immediate things you can do:
One great bit of kit is
the online service Gif
Wizard.
This is a compression program that you access via the web. You just tell it
where on your hard drive or website the image to be compressed is, and let it
do its stuff. It will give you several options; you just pick the one with the
best filesize saving against the degradation of the image. This service is not
free, but it's well worth the small investment if you're doing a lot of web
work. |
The Last Word |
Hopefully, if you follow these tips, you site will load a lot quicker. It does make a real difference to the end viewing experience! There are, of course, things you can do nothing about, like slow servers, net congestion etc - Well recently VSNL has greatly increased its speed. Say thanks to VSNL. But incase of some private ISP's its a nightmare to surf graphics flooded sites.
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The mood of your site is all
important, but its implementation is very subjective. There are ways, though. |
Choose your Mood |
The first thing to do is pin
down what the basic message you're trying to convey is. This sounds easy, but
it can be a real pain! |
Background colours |
It breaks down like this:
That's the basic rule.
Obviously, rules are meant to be broken, but as a rule of thumb, that's not
bad! (an extra tip - to make a site look quite professional , use either black or white
as the background colour - it may be dull, but it's true!) |
Warm or Cold colours? |
"Cold"
colours (blues, greens etc) provoke a sense of being quite "down",
while "warm" colours (reds, oranges, yellows) are inviting and more
cheerful. For instance, if you combine a cold colour with a black background,
you're definitely sending a pretty miserable message. Experiment with different
backgrounds and colours. |
Refinement |
Often the best way to
approach this is with use of FONTS. Whether you have them as images or defined
in html, fonts can give you the look you're after.
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You'll be pleased to hear that there aren't actually that many things to learn about creating a professional-looking site! Here we'll
take you through the basic things that make the difference between the
nastiest personal pages and the professional look we all want. |
Space |
What you're aiming for
is to draw attention to the important bits - the message, the navigation
system or whatever is the main thrust of the page. As a rule, maybe only
75% of your page should be covered with images and text. |
Consistency |
You should aim to keep the look of a site consistent throughout. This means a standard
use of fonts, colours, image styles, layout styles, navigation style
etc. |
Backgrounds |
One of the main
culprits for a bad-looking site are these multicoloured background image
tiles. They also tend to have a definite pattern to them, which can make
text really hard to read. |
Scrolling Text |
If you have a page of
scrolling text, try to split it up into sections on different pages, and
add a navigation system for it. It's just a bit nicer, and keeps the
user from getting hideously lost on the page. Avoid those dead ends
though! This page is very texty we admit, but these tips are done so you
can print them out easily and refer to them! |
Images |
Watch the file size,
but don't make them look horrible on export, or there's no point in them
- find a happy compromise. You shouldn't really have an image file
bigger then 30k anywhere - and that's for a REALLY big picture. Keep
images so that they stay on even the smallest screen, i.e. around 400
pixels across max. |