Web pages: How cute is too cute?

Is your chapter online yet? How about your bulletin? If not, or even if so, you may want to take a look at the pages with a fresh eye. As with most things in life, it helps to know where you're going before getting too far down the road on your journey. What is the primary purpose of your Web site? The chapter site may well be one that you hope will attract people to venture further into it, and the use of some gimmicks like animated graphics, multi-colored backgrounds, etc., might prove useful. Your online bulletin, on the other hand, is probably intended as a way to convey information and keep chapter members and friends informed about recent happenings, upcoming events, personal and chapter milestones, and the like, and simpler may well be better.

People who are just getting into the business of putting up Web resources tend to go overboard in terms of making the pages look cute. It is tempting, when browsing and running across a neat animated graphic or piece of JavaScript or other innovative item, to want to use the same on your pages. Most of us, however, would be better served to remember our purpose and keep the pages as useable as possible rather than trying to make them the prettiest thing on the Web. There are some beautiful barbershop pages on the web that I never go back to, simply because they use so many gimmicks and graphics that they take forever to load.

Here are a few things to watch out for:

Pictures: When scanning pictures for use on the Web, use a low-resolution scan. My old scanner will scan up to 4800 dpi (dots per inch), which makes for a sharp printed picture. Most computer monitors, however, can only display pictures at 100-120 dpi. The additional 4700 dpi on a high resolution scan only makes the file bigger and takes it longer to load, it doesn't look a bit better.

Graphics: Graphics come in many flavors, from background images to stars, dots, lines, buttons, etc. Some are animated GIF files, like a cat chasing a butterfly across the screen, or the under construction icon, animated to show a workman digging a hole. (The under construction icons are another animal entirely. Every decent Web page is always under construction, and we don't need a picture to remind us of the fact.) While the judicious use of graphics can make a page layout more attractive, remember that each one used makes the page slower to load.

The Webmaster at our university refuses to put up any pages that contain a total of 150K in image files (graphics or pictures). A single high resolution picture file can easily be many times that large. I received one recently that was 1,500K.

Proprietary Software: Unfortunately, while html standards for writing Web pages do exist, programs like Microsoft FrontPage don't adhere to them. (I'm not picking on FrontPage. I understand it's a good program, but it can still create problems.) The page that looks beautiful on one Web browser may look entirely different on another because of this problem, and the fancier you try to make the page, the more likely it is to have problems when viewed on another platform. Another problem with proprietary software--especially "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get) programs--is that when you, for example, drag a picture to a certain place on the page, the program codes it to display at that exact location (e.g., 650 pixels from the left side). If someone looks at a page with a browser that only displays 640 pixels across a page, they will have to use a bottom scroll bar to even see the beginning of the picture. And people tend to not like using bottom scroll bars.

For these (and other) reasons, the PROBE Web site uses almost no graphics beyond the front page. Backgrounds are simple--either a plain white, or the simple paper look--and the text is about as plain vanilla as it can be made. It isn't the prettiest site on the Web--but was never intended to be. The purpose was to provide articles and information that could easily be copied and pasted into other applications for your use. Up to this point I have managed to avoid the temptation to make it cute. But I really do like this little animated mailbox--let's see now, if I just stick that in next to the dog chasing his tail....