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DesignedOnaLan
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesA web page so large and slow it must have been "designed on a LAN." That is, the designers never bothered to test it under RealWorld conditions. Sure it's fast and cool on a 100mbps Ethernet connection, but at 33.6kbps, it's a bit crufty.
Chief amongst the useless bits are:
- Large graphics (HowToReduceImageSize)
- ShockWave?/Flash
- Large text dumps
- Background music
See also EightSecondHalfLife.
A long time ago, I worked with a graphic artist to design a small website for a department of a large corporation. This was the first time the artist had done anything for the web, so they wanted to know what a web page would look like. (This was around the Netscape 1.0 days, before most of the hype.) I sent the artist a floppy with a couple screen-captures of web sites.
A couple weeks later, we got back our first versions of the proposed art. The pictures were beautiful--the client really liked them. The artist had loaded the screen-captures into Photoshop and replaced the other site's contents with a full-screen detailed picture with a nicely shaded background. I think the picture sizes were about 100K.
We explained to the client that these pages would take more than 30 seconds for most people to download. (At that time, 14.4 modems were common, but a lot of users still used 9600 bps modems.) After a bit of design, we made a set of icon-buttons that covered most of the screen, but were about 2K each. We were also able to reuse the icons throughout the site.
The project was quite a revelation for the artist, who was used to working on huge (50 MB+) graphic files for brochures. We also learned quite a bit about big corporations in the process. Everything turned out well--the website was a success, and eventually the web services division of the company took over and replaced our site. --CliffordAdams
Yuck. I've met designers sites like this. But they've told me that they're only interested in the audience on their network. So then why are they publishing on the WWW?