Nav-i-Bar

Want to compare this to the original 1997 version. Well, now you can.

Web Design

In many respects this whole page was inspired by Robert Atkins, who used to maintain a 'diatribes page' from which he subjected the world to his opinions about Netscape, Microsoft and non-standard html. This page is not so far ranging. It simply attempts to explain my thoughts on web design and how, time permitting, I try to construct my web pages.

Robert's diatribe was against non-standard html, and against the explosion of images, sound and multimedia crap that had started to emerge. Now remember, this was 1997. Bandwidth was more scarce and a lot of graphics heavy pages were showing up using graphics and multimeda for, well, just the fuck of it.Unlike Robert, I did not have a huge blanket objection to the explosion of graphics and sound on the net. But I qualify that by adding "where appropriate". If the purpose of a www site is to entertain or requires graphics and sound to more effectively present information then so be it. What I was opposed to then, and what I am still opposed to, is graphics for the sake of it. If the primary focus of a site is on providing information then no amount of graphics will substitute for quantity and quality of information. At it's worst, it can prove an annoying distraction to have to wait for a page full of graphics to download in order to view a page in a presentable fashion… which leads me to a pet hate.

Pages which become totally unusable once graphics are switched off or when viewed from a non-graphical browser! I don't expect the non-graphics page to look as nice, but I do expect that it will still be functional. Unfortunately there was , and still are, many sites which fit this criteria. The usual response I get from web-masters when I email them with my criticism is that they expect everyone to use graphics. My reply is that 1) some people like to switch graphics off to speed things up, especially if on a slow link or slow modem. Less than 2% of Australian net users are on broadband and even on a 56k modem, sometimes it's nice to just switch graphics off and get to the information quicker. 2) A lot of Internet access plans have a volume charging component. So some people pay according to traffic and hence graphical pages cost more. Although the price per Meg has fallen a lot since 1997, web pages that use half a meg of graphics to create a fancy navigation bar still shit me. Notice the 'Nav-i-Bar' for my site comes in at under 20k. I guess my point is, how many predominantly-text pages worth of information can you get with 1 MB versus how many pages full of graphics you would get.

So as I said at the start, sometimes a graphics or multimedia frenzy is excusable. Pure entertainment site - ok. Brief promo of a business - ok Web album or photo portfolio - fair enough. All singing , all dancing navigation bar and animated introduction to an information based site - you have to be joking! With this in mind I endeavor to try and keep my web pages clean and simple, only using minimal graphics.The exception of course is when the purpose of the page is to show off photos and images.

One last point. Whilst ever .html remains relatively simple, or there exists tools to make it simple, everyone can make a positive contribution to the WWW and everyone can express their opinions in an effective manner which everyone will notice. In 1997 I said that "The big media companies have shown their preference for increasingly more complex , hyped up, multimedia bonanza's as the way of the future for the web." My concern then was that this would mean only large media companies would be able to effectively construct and present information on the web. IMNSHO this a bad thing. Fortunately, although .html has become more complex and big media companies are doing all singing and all dancing sites, the popularity of the web as an outlet for non-commercial content providers has not declined. One of the greatest things about the web is that so anyone can have their say and be heard, unlike in the mainstream mass media. It would be a shame if we were to loose that I think.

But enough of that.. we now return you to your regular viewing

Heath

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