DW Designs - Reference Area

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Web Services	Graphic Design	Digital Illustration/Manipulation
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Newsletters	Copy writing	Strategic Planning
Environmental Design	Advertising	Catalog Design & Production
Multimedia	Public Relations	Annual Reports

Service Provider Advice

The List is the definitive buyer's guide to Internet Service Providers. The List allows you to find a provider that offers the access speed and computing services that satisfy your needs and budget.
http://www.thelist.com/

My impression is that anything more than $30/month for an unlimited access SLIP/PPP account is highway robbery, as is charging extra for Web pages or other services. The nationwide services are _usually_ more consistant, with shorter systemwide downtimes and fewer problems than the local guys, but if you have a specific problem, getting through to the big services and getting an answer for _your_ specific problem is not easy.

Basically, don't pay too much up-front (a free week or month is a very good idea), and feel them out. If you don't like one service, for whatever reason, find another. Just bear in mind that they all have problems.

Graphics on the Internet

In lined images are what caused the Internet popularity boom in 1994-1995. Some people can be captivated by a pageful of interesting text, but most of the world responds to images. If you want to appeal to these people, you should include images in your Web pages.

On the other hand, you should also try to keep the "message" in your pages in text, don't rely on the images to tell the story. A small percentage of WWW users still view pages as text only. Also, text just gets around more easily than graphics. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but most pictures take a thousand words worth of storage space and transfer time, too.

Icons

Icons are great. They're small (usually 1000 bytes or less), and they easily lend themselves to re-use. Re-use is an important concept. Because I'm using the same icons over and over, they only has to transfer across the Internet once. If you create a page with 100 unique icons, then each one will have to be sent across the Internet, delaying your page from reaching the reader. Of course, if you have a reason to have unique icons, by all means, have unique icons, just remember that the fewer unique icons you have, the less your reader will have to wait.

Pictures

When you've got something specific to show, include a picture of it. Usually, pictures only appear once in a page. If you want to, you can display a smaller picture, or even a thumb-nail image if that's appropriate, and let it be a link to a larger picture, so the user can click on the small one to get the big one, if they want it.

Beware of including too many pictures on any one page. Once the number of images to be loaded for a given page goes above 4 or 5 (including wallpaper and icons), many users will notice a lot of delay while loading the page. Delay comes both from the size of the image, and just its existence. Like a long distance phone call, there is a connect charge, plus a per byte charge, but in this case they're paid in time. Rates vary, but if you're attempting to reach readers who are on 14.4 or 28.8 modems, you can count on 2 seconds per connection (often as much as 5 or 10), plus 1 second per 1500 bytes (again, this can be much slower). If you've got 15 images on your page, and they're taking 10 seconds each to load, you'd better hope that your reader is willing to wait 3 minutes to see what's on your page. A better idea is to break the page up into smaller pages that will each load more quickly.

Storage Formats

There are two primary image storage formats used on the Internet, GIF and JPG. GIF was first, and most older browsers only support in lined GIF images, but in most cases JPG is better. Unless there is some reason, I use JPG images, and the people with the older browsers can click to load them to an external viewer.

GIF/89a supports transparent backgrounds. This is really nice, since it allows you to merge your image with the wallpaper, instead of having a rectangular border. The graphic is a GIF file. GIF files also support interlaced storage which means that the images appear first in a low resolution, then get progressively sharper. This is all well and good, but first, I've noticed that Netscape doesn't always load the whole interlaced image, leaving it fuzzy, and second, by the time the fuzzy part of an interlaced GIF has loaded, a complete JPG image might have loaded instead. I don't recommend interlaced GIFs.

JPG is a "lossy compression" scheme where what you get back doesn't exactly match what you put in. It is not really appropriate for Icons, or presentation graphics, and in most cases, GIF gives better compression for these kinds of images. However, for scanned photographs, JPG is far better than GIF. Using a relatively high quality factor, you truly won't notice the difference between an original photo and a JPG copy, and the JPG copy can be as little as 1/10th the storage size - quite a bonus. You can also "fuzz the image out", by reducing the quality factor, which produces a noticeably blurred image, but still not bad, and again makes a significant dent in the storage size.

When including pictures in pages, I usually go for a mid-sized low quality image that has good visual impact. This image is a clickable link to a larger (as large as is appropriate) high quality image that will give the interested viewer as much detail as possible.

Image Processing

There are many shareware and retail commercial graphics programs that allow you to manipulate images. Spending a few minutes with one of these can enhance your image significantly. You can shrink, stretch, color balance, retouch, etc. etc. etc. If you enjoy playing with images this way, you can spend hours enhancing your pictures.

Wallpapers

Notes specifically addressing wallpaper to go behind web pages:
You can reduce the size of your JPG images drastically by reducing the quality factor. You can make colors display better on multi-image pages by reducing the "color depth" as much as possible before the image degrades. This is most important to people who use 256 color mode, because if each image uses 16.7 million colors, the browser software will have a tough time attempting to assign the 256 available colors, and some images may come out in "funky color". Reducing the color depth also reduces the storage size. Strong horizontal patterning usually makes bad wallpaper due to interference with lines of text and other horizontal separator lines.

Style

If you're putting together a set of business pages, you should consider developing a consistent (but unique) style, so your potential customers will get accustomed to, and thus more friendly with, your presentations. Big corporations do this throughout their product lines, developing customer loyalty through that sense of familiarity. On a Web page, your graphics are going to define your style.