The Whole Point of Web Pages

Web pages are meant as a means to disseminate information, whether it be straight forward information or even online ordering.

This page is simple so that it cannot be accused of falling into the same trap as other bad pages, it could be better, however the blind users with text to speech can read it.

Time and time again user surveys come up with user complaints of:-

• Not interested in dancing graphics, marquees or mouse over cuties
• Not interested in self grandisement, they are after the information QUICKLY
• Slow download times - which are mainly due to
  1. poor host bandwidth,
  2. excessive page size (WYSIWIG effects, unnecessary code, scripts etc.),
  3. too many and too large graphics,
• unreadable pages,
• difficult to navigate sites (poor layout, bad terminology, broken links or search engines).
• Simple things like having graphics to display your contact details, some users might want to copy your address, phone number or email address, to their address book, or for that letter to send you an order or payment!

Listening to user complaints may make your site easier to navigate, and encourage more users to use it, which will only help you the designers and owners of the site.

Time and time again these are ignored, especially by large corporations, who assume many things, the oft heard cry is -

"What about W3 (w3c.org)"

Well the W3 organisation does NOT in its standards ask designers to assume that every browser is on a system, that is -

1. Identical to to the designers
2. Have a T3 connection (for quite a while many users will only have a 56K modem)
3. Always running the SAME software browser ONLY that the deisgner has
4. Every system has a sound card on so the 128KB sound file can be downloaded always
5. Assume ALL users ONLY ever go to your web site
6. Assume ALL users have nothing else to do with their lives

The standards where they converge and are used properly, are there to make it so that your information can be viewed HOPEFULLY in the way the designer intended on ANY machine using ANY software.

If you don't beleive us look at some of these sites that also recommend good coding for ANY browser:-

• www.anybrowser.org
• www.useit.com
• www.w3c.org Includes many technical details on web page design and has a validator to check pages, try your own on this to see if yours work

For example, if you have lots of large pages, with lots of script and images, then your bandwidth requirements go up at the server, and more people will think you have a slow site as they take ages to get responses from the site.

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The League Against Poor Web Design & Web WYSIWIG Packages That Should be Shot at Dawn