Good Design: Have somebody with artistic flair, e.g. a graphics designer, create your logos, imagemaps, etc. This will give your presentation a more professional look and feel, as well as a common flow throughout the documents.
Color: Don't use color to convey significant information - some people are color-blind. The majority of the color-blind population is red/green deficient. Avoid excessive dependency on these two color palettes. Choose a characteristic color scheme. Using a common color for each separate area can aid the user to orient themselves within a large and complex site.
Download Time(s): One of the major strengths of GUI Web browsers is the possibility to develop extraordinary graphical interaction with the user. Its also one of the major problems for people at the other end of not-so-fast links. Only include in-line images if they are essential to support the text, used as place-holders, or aid in navigation. Avoid the common mistake of letting the image convey the message alone. Images should be used in support of the text elements of the document. Use the approach that, "if I couldn't see the images, would my message still get across?" When developing all graphics, keep the inline size less that 5KB per image. To aid this process, images with limited color differences (solids as opposed to multi-granular colors) will still convey the message allowing larger presentation with smaller file size. Transforming large (greater than 10KB) images to interlaced format is also helpful in speeding up rendering times. If your users don't mind the overhead, consider using an imagemap; this can be an attractive and effective way to present your offerings. But provide alternatives requiring less overhead, e.g. a text-only list of the hyperlinks.
Graphics Alternatives: It is important to keep in mind that not all World Wide Web browsers (e.g. Lynx) support graphics. Therefore, it is helpful to assign a word or phrase to replace the image when it cannot be displayed. This can be done using the ALT modifier tag. If you do not want anything to appear in place of the image, then define the tag to be ALT=" ". Otherwise, the default tag "[IMAGE]" or "[INLINE]" will be assigned. The default tags are viewed by many on the Internet as a sure sign of someone who hasn't touched HTML directly, or of an author who is ignoring the text-only segment of users. Also, the graphic alternatives survive when a document is sent to a text printer or e-mailed from within a browser whereas the graphic images will not be translated or rendered with the output.
This document was produced using HTML Transit