Thoughts (random and various)

In a word – please stop using them.

They’re visual spam, and only serve to distract and annoy your visitors. Imagine if you walked into a store, and the clerks handed you flyers as you walked in the door, out the door, and up and down every aisle. Pretty darn annoying, no? Would you go back? I sure wouldn’t.

So why is it suddenly OK to do it to your website visitors? It’s not – it reeks of desperation. “Please, PLEASE, look at this special offer – if you don’t buy NOW, we’ll be out of business!!” Not someplace I want to establish a long-term relationship with.

And it confuses a lot of people who don’t realize that extra windows are popping up all over. Instead, put your specials in a well-created graphic on your home page (or every page). Write compelling copy, and draw visitors to your specials by offering them all the great benefits of your products or services.

If you’re so desperate for advertising revenue from these third-party services, you should probably not be in business, as your own services are not compelling enough. Take your website out back and put it out of its misery, and then call in a professional website development firm, who will craft a website that informs, entertains and drives sales to you, all without those damn pop-ups!

This last tip is so easy to implement (and avoid) that it’s almost frightening how often we encounter it. We’re talking about those textured or graphic backgrounds on websites that make the content virtually impossible to read. Usually, it’s a field of stars, or a cloudy/blue sky, or flowers, or even bricks! The image is wallpapered onto the website pages, and the content becomes unreadable because the text gets lost in the colors of the graphic. Light or dark text doesn’t seem to matter, since either one gets swallowed up by the wallpaper.

The solution is simple – don’t use an image in the background of your web pages. Or, if you must, make sure your text is readable on top of the wallpaper. Some images won’t work, as is, no matter what color text you try. This is because the image itself has so much contrast within its colors – they’re all over the spectrum.

If you want to use an image as a background, either fade it out, to the point where it becomes a watermark, or darken it to where it’s almost a shadow of itself. This created a low contrast image, and then you can find a text color that complements the low-contract background (if the image is faded to white, a dark color text will usually work, and vice verse).

Speaking of long download times, how many of you optimize your photos and images before you put them on your website? What’s optimization, you say? It’s the process of making the image as small in filesize as possible (smaller filesize = faster download) while still maintaining a certain level of clarity and crispness. This is usually done through compression, which almost any image editing software will do, if asked nicely.

Too many times, I have visited websites where the images are scanned in lifesize or photos are dumped directly from the digital camera to the web. Beginner web designers don’t realize the images are so large, because they seem to appear instantly when testing the website on their own machines. Well, of course they do – they’re already ‘downloaded’ to your hard drive! And to make matters worse, a lot of drag and drop website software will allow you to place an image on a web page without optimizing it. The image may ‘look’ small, but all you really did was ‘virtually’ resize it with web code (HTML), not actually resize it with proper compression and optimization.

The key here is to learn how to use your graphics software (PhotoShop, Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks, anything that edits images), apply the proper amount of compression and select the proper resolution.

JPG compression is as much art as science – there is no set value that works for all images. Play around with the compression settings, and look for the best combination of compression percentage (higher percentage means ‘less’ compression) and clarity – If you apply too much compression, the image will become very blocky or blurry.

As far as resolution, be sure to resample all images to 72 d.p.i. (dots per inch). Monitors cannot support anything higher anyway, so all that extra info is wasted space (and longer download times). By way of comparison, scanners usually scan at 300 dpi or higher. That’s OK, scan at the higher resolutions, just be sure to resample to 72 dpi when you’re ready to put that image on the web.

With careful planning, compression and resolution changes, you can achieve huge savings in file size (and subsequent bandwidth / transmission costs) for your website. Smaller sizes mean faster downloads, and faster downloads means a more responsive and customer-friendly website. That almost always turns into higher profits, as people stick around to see your info and don’t click away while they wait for an image that will never appear!

Ever get stuck on a website that blared music at you, with no warning? And then, you look for a volume control or off switch, and there is none – you’re reduced to scrambling for the volume control on your speakers while your co-workers are wondering what your up to! Read more »

Hello Everyone!

I’ll be in Texas visiting my mom from Thurs March 10, 2011 umtil March 15, 2011, and back in the office for Tuesday.

With this notice, support requests/updates send on Thurs, Fri or Mon will not be handled until I return, and are not subject to the next-business-day or free rule.

Voice mail will be checked once a day – please, be kind, only leave a VM if something is on fire.

Thank you.