Constructive Criticism Corner ( C3 ) Part 2 
10/08/2001
A page maintained by our good friend PimpTastique...
In this continuing series I will pass on some of my vast knowledge in the field of... HOW TO BUILD A NON-CRAPPY SITE, also known as how to avoid us trashing your site when we review it! :)  

Frames: Frames are bad. Why? Well hmmm...they aren't supported by all browsers, they load slower (2 or more pages vs. 1), you can't bookmark any pages within the site, they tend to be used wrong, they waste space, they can cause problems if used wrong for people at different screen resolutions.

So why do people use them? Well its for organization usually, though sometimes they use them for shielding code so that people can't steal pics or something on the site. Of course there are other ways to do this, but people are sometimes lazy. Also its easier to just have a constant navigation frame, but again this can be done better with other methods. So now you are asking...he keeps saying they are bad, but what should I use instead? Tables.

Why tables? Well you can use them for placement, specifying either a fixed or percentage width. You can do all kinds of cool things with tables, including specifying table, or even cell background color. Really you should play with them. Now what is the drawback to tables? They don't do partial loads, they load all at once. So you see nothing until the whole table is loaded, so until it loads things can look either blank or weird. The key to this not happening is a little something I like to call - intelligence. Don't put all kinds of big pictures all over. Which leads me to my next section.

Pictures: We all love pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words. They also kill load times. Now the first thing I wanna say about pictures is a BIG pet peeve of mine: don't HTML resize pictures for thumbnails. You can't take an image at a resolution of 800x600 and then specify in the HTML that the size is 50x50 and have anything good come of it. You see what happens when you do this is that 800x600 file (likely a few hundred Kilobytes big) gets its size shrunk down on screen but its file size remains. So you now have a 800x600 picture, resized to 50x50 but still a few hundred KB big. This kills load time. Imagine you have a gallery and you want to display your 16 pictures (4 rows of 4) as thumbnails, and each file is 150KB at its normal 800x600 resolution. Hmmm....16*150=2400KB or 2.4MB. And that is just for your pictures. You can pretty much guarantee no one on anything below DSL will wait for that page to load. So what you need to do it open up Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, anything which can edit pictures, and resize it that way. Then when you save it you will notice a smaller file size. Now people who are on DSL and lower can view your site and not wait hours.

Ok, next - don't over do it on the pics. Don't have background pics, pics for the nav bar, pics of your work, etc all over. Again, you are killing the bandwidth. Use pictures sparingly, they should have a purpose beyond looking neat.

That is it for this part, tune in next time when we talk about... I dunno, whatever I am inspired to teach you about. :)