Oh, and I just have to put this up. I recently came across a webpage created by an absolute newbie. It LOOKED fancy enough, with DHTML and all the frills, but the whole site simply screamed "UNPROFESSIONAL" as clearly as if it had been stamped in an H1 tag across the top of the page. With that in mind, here are some Common Mistakes To Avoid When Creating Web Pages:

Mistake 1: Colour Clash

This seems obvious, but isn't. The person in question (whom I personally know) has impeccable taste in most matters. However, her use of cyan and electric-blue text on a dark orange-brown background was absolutely and totally uncalled-for. Some colour combinations DO NOT work, folks - and don't go squawking "Oh, Wired did it this way, so I can too!" If you're anything but extremely experienced, my friend, then let me assure you - You Are NOT Wired. Stick with safe colours.

Mistake 2: Diarrhoea

In other words - an excess of overly-fluid motion. This refers to those newbies who start out with Dreamweaver or some similar program - text and images spin onto the screen, slide onto the screen, drop onto the screen, rise onto the screen, etc. One line of text, or one image, is just about the limit when you're dealing with that. When more than half the words and images on the page are suffering from chronic hyperactivity, it's a sure sign that the creator either (a) has an extreme lack of good taste, or (b) is a rank amateur (and by "rank" I also mean "foul-smelling").

Mistake 3: Image Insanity (part the first)

Don't use the size features on the IMG tag ("HEIGHT" and "WIDTH") to downsize an image. If you need a smaller image, use an image editor to shrink it and save the smaller version separately. There are two reasons for this:
first, it makes the small image look better, and
second, it decreases load time.
Having a long load time due to a large image is sometimes forgivable, but having a long load time because you didn't bother to lift a finger and manually shrink the images is totally inexcusable.
Yes, I know that many popular HTML editors will use the HEIGHT and WIDTH things to do autodownsizing. That's not an acceptable excuse. If you have to manually "handle-and-drag" the image down to a smaller size in your HTML editor, you're already guilty. Decide on a size, use an image editor to MAKE the image that size, and then don't resize it in the HTML editor.

Mistake 3: Image Insanity (part the second)

also known as - Why We Need Both GIFs And JPEGs.
For large images, unless they contain large expanses of plain colour, don't use GIFs. Save the image as a JPG - in the image editor, that is. This will slash download times by a factor of (probably) 50%. Under NO circumstances should you "rename" a GIF to a JPG and think that this makes it a JPG (or vice versa). It doesn't. (For the experienced - don't laugh; it's entirely possible to think like that.)
For images which have just a few colours and/or few "smooth" gradual changes in tone - save it as a GIF, and (more importantly) remember to reduce the colour depth as far as possible. "Huh? What do you mean?" you ask. Well, it's simple. Most image editors will have some sort of function like "reduce colour depth" or "compress palette" or something. Use it to reduce the image colour depth (the number of colours) as far as you can go without sacrificing too much image quality. Once again, this will probably cause significant speed increases. If you manage to reduce a 256-colour image to 16 colours, that effectively halves the image file size and doubles the speed with which it loads.
Another note: 16-bit colour does NOT mean 16 colours! A quick guide here - 16-bit colour means 65536 colours. 24-bit means 16 million colours (approximately). 32-bit means 4 BILLION (that's 4000000000 for those of you who have a different definition of billion) colours. JPG files are usually about the same size even if their colour depth is very high, so you can feel free to use 32-bit colour. GIF files never have more than 256 colours, and even then that's way too many for a large image. You can push many images down to 16 or 32 colours without significant loss of quality, but if you want photo-quality images, don't even THINK about using a GIF.

31st March 2000