Designing Your Pages

We've all heard the Golden Rule a million times: Keep your pages simple, and avoid bandwidth-hogging graphics like the plague. This is an excellent general rule, but how strictly to apply it depends on your business model.

If your site exists solely to provide information, especially in an academic or intranet context, then leave the graphics out altogether. Your users don't need or want them, so they're simply a waste of everybody's time. Provide what your users need, and not a byte more. Focus on making the information well-organized and easy to get to.

On a corporate site, however, whether you're selling a particular product or simply providing information about the company, you need to have attractive pages, including some tasteful graphics. The last time I entered a bank, they still had thousands of bucks worth of art, plants, etc. sprucing up the lobby. Illogical? Maybe. If the bank mowed the grass every month instead of every week, they might be able to pay better interest on customer accounts. If an e-commerce site stuck to a bare-bones design, they might be able to cut prices and make the ordering process a lot faster.

However, human nature doesn't work that way. Commercial media, whether it's a Web site, a printed ad, or the façade of a building, is expected to look attractive and to be up to the highest standards of quality. Graphics often serve a functional purpose - a picture is worth a thousand words, after all. But they also fill certain psychological needs. A nice-looking logo and a bright, clear picture of a smiling company president may not tell us anything about the product, but they give the impression of a solid organization that cares about the way they do things.

Of course, if you overdo it, fancy graphics can give exactly the opposite impression. Strive for simple elegance, and be sure to make your page design fit the type of organization that you're representing. A soft drink company needs a completely different design scheme than a law firm. See the URLier WDVL article, Designing Attractive Web Pages, for some ideas on how to choose a fitting design scheme.

If you have online ordering, keep the ordering pages bare-bones and fast, even if the rest of the site is an artistic tour de force. Once a user has made the decision to buy, don't stand in their way. For example, on my BluesPages site, I have a fancy-shmancy animated graphic on every page - except the ordering page.

Will there ever be a situation in which the poor graphic designer can just go hog-wild, and bandwidth worries be damned? Certainly. If what you're advertising is a graphics or animation shop, then pile on the beautiful graphics. If you're touting a Web design shop, then you'd better show the world something impressive (although I'd probably be more impressed by something functional, like a clever navigation scheme with handy pop-up menus, than by a flashy animation).

Of course, there is such a thing as art, too. A site that exists for artistic purposes (paid or unpaid) will use whatever techniques needed to achieve the desired effect. If some bandwidth-challenged person stumbles upon your masterwork, that's just too bad. If you're not interested in getting money from the masses, then there's no reason for you to bring your product down to the masses' level.

There's also such a thing as pushing the envelope, simply for the edification of fellow developers. Wacky HTML, for example, uses the wildest and craziest HTML techniques that the authors can find. It takes forever to load, only works on certain browsers, and sometimes doesn't work at all. If you're not wacky, don't enter.

Needless to say, most sites don't want wacky - they want functional. Deciding how much graphic and interactive material to use is a balancing act between the need to conserve bandwidth and the desire to make your pages as attractive as possible. Whatever you do, don't skimp on the quality of your graphics, and make sure that they're optimized for the Web (See Optimizing Graphics for the Web and All You Need to Know About Web-safe Colors). And keep that business model / site objective firmly in mind!

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