Post #33939 by RhumbaKitty on Tue, May 13, 2003 6:10 AM

I totally agree with James! I have designed sites and after some time created my own, and as I crawled through to web, I took copious notes. It's obnoxious and counter-productive to make your site inhospitable to those without "the latest..." Frankly, if viewers have to work or wait too long to interact with your site, they may give up and leave in disgust!

The most common issue I have seen in new sites is the tendency for pictures to have much higher resolution than necessary for computer viewing. I designed gallery pages for viewing and NOT for printing (and stealing), so a page with even nine photos could load for the first time in less than a minute! (Pictures you offer for others to copy and print are another story, but then you can use thumbnails) Now that multi-mega-pixel digital cameras are so inexpensive, I fear that this will be a worse problem than in the past.

Try it out, have others look at it, pretend you know nothing of your site--does it make sense? Can you get "anywhere from here" within the site?

Also, in response to Turbogod's comment, spelling is more critical than length. I have been paying for a domain name for the last three years that I won't be using now. It was short and appropriate, and I liked it, but it had a word in it that several people have gotten terribly wrong. A memorable phrase or sentence works better than short, if it gets people there.