 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.)What is the standard in page dimensions? 800x600 pixels is considered the standard for web authoring, despite the fact that most of us have defaults for higher settings. ( For instance, the Public Site computers at Lehigh are defaulted to 1024 X 768) The actual number of pixels used within any web browser is slightly smaller than the listed setting. Unfortunately, if your web page is larger than the available pixels for the web browser, your picture in the window will be cut off. Moreover, in this case, scrollbars will appear on either the right side or the bottom of the window -- and constantly having to scroll in order to see a page becomes frustrating to users. Try to avoid horizontal scroll bars, as many users will not even notice them and miss important content on your webpage. How long should it take for my web page to finish loading? The average time a user will spend looking at a website as it loads is 7 seconds, according to industry research. A 56k modem can transfer 52,300 bites per second. However due to a variety of technical constraints, the typical connection is around 30,000 bites per second or 3.75 kilobytes per second (note that 8 bytes make a bit). Recently, broadband internet access has become more common and users are able to download much more content quickly. A good rule of thumb is to keep your web pages down to approximately 75KB of data, if possible. If you have a lot of images on your website, and some pages are considerably larger than others, make sure the lead page is not so large. If a page takes too long to load, users may think the server is down and hit the back button before your page begins to render. The following is a list of commonly used web pages and the size of their initial web page that loads. I should note that many of these webpages are kept small to minimize the load on the server's side. www.yahoo.com - 42KB What is the difference between a pixel count and percentage? In HTML many objects can be set to take up an exact amount of space. For example, you can specify images to take a fixed size in pixels, or you can scale the size of the image to the number of the available pixels -- based on percentage of the web space designated for that image. This is demonstrated below using two horizontal rule lines: Static pixel line (200 pixels) Variable percentage line (50% page width)
Obviously, the alignment of images on a page may change if the design of the page is set up in tables assigned to percentages. The page design must be malleable to that change --in other words, the layout must be able to "scale" or adjust to those percentages without losing an attactive layout. Otherwise, the layout will look all askew in any other setting than the one in which it was designed. If the design is fixed in pixels to an 800 X 600 setting, the user will see a "white space" on the right of the screen in a larger setting. How many item's should I have on a menu? Generally 7 to 9 items should be used on a menu. Too many items in a menu clutter the screen and hinder navigation. (See Lehigh's homepage.) Users have difficulty trying to find what they are looking for when too much information is listed. Re-organize your website with submenus and internal layers if you need to point the user to more information. An exception to this rule is if the site is organized both sequentially and non-sequentially, as in this tutorial. What do you see first? Just like in
a painting or photograph, the elements of the page should
lead to the thing noticed first. Generally speaking:
|
