The Hermit Hacker wrote:
>
> I hate to come back to same thing over again, but I still think that
> www.php.net is a nice example of 'spreadability', as well as color and
> graphics...its just got a nice "feel" to it.
I like the PHP page as well, mostly because of the feeling that it's all
'contained'...much like (gasp) www.msnbc.com (at least it used to be
that way) and www.ibm.com, with a definite top and bottom to the page.
Pages deeper in the site tend to be longer, because the content dictates
it, but I think you'll find that users like a nice, compact design.
> I like the fact that the buttons let you *know* that you are over top of
> it...and the use of javascript for doing the submenus is attractive (see
> the search feature)...
I like the PHP submenu for search as well...very clean, and quick.
However, I can't be in support of those features if they come at the
expense of load time. The PHP site loads very quickly, mostly because
the images are solid colors, and therefore, very small. Too many JS
rollovers, or animated GIFs, can make your page take long enough to load
that the viewer might just decide that mysql's page loads faster... A
trick to this of course is to use Adobe's ImageReady, or a similar app
(sorry, but GIMP doesn't quite have the flexibility in this category...)
to alter/compress the graphics for speedy presentation on the web,
without losing any quality. By just taking all of the images through
ImageReady and tinkering with them, we (corporate webmaster and I) were
able to cut average load time on the corporate web site in half. Just a thought...
--
Nick Bastin - RBB Systems, Inc.
Out hme0, through the Cat5K, Across the ATM backbone, through the
firewall, past the provider, hit the router, down the fiber, off another
router... Nothing but net.
