About Site Design...

If you need a website, talk to me. If you already have a website, this should still be of interest to you. You’re probably not a techie and don't want to know anything about the mysteries of site design, but you might be paying somebody to work on your site who is possibly costing you more than you should be spending, and may be causing site visitors to leave your site because it loads slowly. Reason? Bloated and old-style code.

How Can This be?

The short story is that many sites are being built with old technology! The Internet is about 30 years old, the World Wide Web (a part of the Internet) has been available for commercial use since the early ’90s, and yet even today, despite improvements to the way pages can be coded, many people are still using the same original HTML styles to write the instructions that “print” the design to the screen.

It’s too much to really explain as a snapshot of “how”, but here is one great example: even just on this one page there are two basic styles of text: bold headlines and plain body copy. (Links are another matter and are typically blue so that they are recognized as links!) And every time there is a new header followed by a new paragraph, the old HTML code required font tags to give instructions to the browser so that the page would display headlines and body copy in their different styles.

Example: Here is the old font tag pair that had to be used to indicate every paragraph:
<font size="3" face="Times">This is another paragraph.</font>
Note that each font pair needed both an opening and closing tag, and each opening describes the size and type face, plus any color if that changed. This had to be repeated with every paragraph!

Of course there were font tags for every headline, and many other tags that had to be repeated time after time, page after page. Any whim to change headlines to green, or body copy to red meant that each and every font tag for that element had to be tracked down and changed, then each page reloaded to the server. Whew! Tedious business.

But Now We Have Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Things are much easier now. A style sheet is just what it should sound like: a single sheet (file, actually) that is like a blueprint for the site design. Want to use red copy on a page? Just change a single line of code on the style sheet and reload one page: Presto! Every page of the site will have red copy when it is displayed.

Test this by clicking on the two links below. The default style is black lettering, the red style is a separate style sheet that is called when you click the link. The switch is immediate. Try them: default | go red

Note that the red style sheet only changes the instruction for the <p> tag which controls the paragraphs. The headlines don’t change and the line of code is not really a paragraph as it is set in <code> tags; these elements remain unchanged.

Why You Should Care

The main reason is that using old HTML is causing site visitors to download as much as twice the code as CSS might need. If you’re lucky enough to have high-speed cable or even DSL, you probably won't notice the delay, but a person with dial-up (all that many rural addresses can get) may not want to wait. Of course many other factors (like too many images or other large files) will slow down your page delivery, but that’s for a bit later.

I have visited several websites done by other local designers and found—to my great surprise!— that most of them use old style HTML. Look at the repeating <font> tags:

 

Javascript Navigation? Old Hat!

Javascript is still a great way to handle some tricks on Web pages but it is a very intensive way to simply create the popular roll-over navigation methods. A better way to handle this would be to use CSS. Roll the mouse over this image and watch it change:

There are a number of clever ways to juice up a site, but there should be consideration for the visitor who may not have the connection speed, the proper plug-ins, or sometimes even just the right browser! The fact that I have a high-speed connection and it still took 15 seconds to load the Flash introduction to the Red Hawk Casino makes me wonder what happens when somebody with a dial-up connection (56k) has to wait maybe five minutes or more to load the same file! Maybe I'm picking nits but I remember when all I could get in this area was dial-up, and the usual connection was about 24k because of twisted-wire phone connections to the building.

Note: This is a page in progress. I will add more as I can, so check back if this interests you, or call me to discuss your site: 530 622 6567. Thanks.

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