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Contents of this page: Limitations of the web | Font face and font size | Colors | Images and file size | Screen resolution | HTML and browser compatibility | Reader behaviour
Limitations of the web:
What do your visitors have in the house?
A website has the power of a reaching a large public. But for actually enabling as many people as possible to read your information, the pages shall be easily accessible. Lamentable as it is: you are totally dependent on the technical possibilities that visitors have in the house: the capability of their equipment, installed software and speed of their internet connection.
Besides, it it essential to realise that reading from a screen is rather different from reading a brochure, and that writing for the web has rules of its own.
If your targetted public has frequent physical handicaps, it may be wise to consult appropriate sites for dealing with it.
Most often, barriers are created unknowingly. That's why it is rather useful to deepen yourself a bit into the potentialities, limitations and peculiarities of the web when developing a website.
Beneath is a short listing. More comprehensive information about most of these subjects is available under the button series 'Working with ...'.
Font face and font size
When defining font faces in your site, you are dependent upon the software installed on the visitor's computer whether he or she is able to actually see this font face. If the font isn't installed, the visitor will see a different font face. Only a very limited number of font faces is more or less standard present in most Windows, Linux and Mac systems and are therefore considered to be usable 'webfonts'.
For defining the font size you cannot use the common metrical system in which the size is expressed in 'points'. Instead, the web has its own measure system in which only the sizes 1 till 7 can be applied.
More information: see Working with fonts.
Colors
In principle you have a choice out of well over 16 million colors. The technical possibilities of the visitor's monitor, however, decide the number of colours that is actually seen. In the passed years, the quality of monitors has improved so much that you do not need really need to be careful any longer in adding colors.
If you know that your target visitors still have rather primitive equipment, it may be wise to only apply the limited palette of 216 so-called 'safe colors'.
More information: see Working with colors.
Images and file size
Restrain the use of many and particularly of large images. They heavily influence the size of the page in kB, and consequently also heavily influence the time that it takes to view a page on the screen.
The 'download time' of a page is dependent, amongst others, on the quality of the internet connection, and on the speed of the modem and computer of the visitor. Visitors with a common phone line or a poor cable connection often do not have a download speed of over 6 kB per second at their disposal. We'll leave you to guess how long it would take to view an image with a size of 120 kB.
Fortunately, many 'image editors' exist: programmes capable of limiting the file size of images or optimizing images for the web otherwise. Unless you publish photographs or so for special purposes, such images of 'web quality' will do on the screen.
More information: see Working with images.
Screen resolution
The capability of the visitor's monitor determines in what size your site will be displayed. If the resolution (number of pixels on the screen) is higher, more information will fit in the screen. At present, the most commonly used screen resolutions are 800x600 pixels, 1024x768 pixels, or higher.
It is annoying, if not unfeasible, to read pages of which the lines run out of the screen. Visitors would have to scroll horizontally for every line. That's why it is advised to suit your site for a width of 800 pixels at least.
If you know that your target visitors still have rather primitive equipment: suit your site for a screen resolution of 640x480 pixels.
More information: see Working with sizes.
HTML and browser compatibility
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a computer language developed in the beginning of the 90's for linking up texts in documents with each other (so-called 'hypertext') in an easy way. Only later HTML has become the standard language for producing documents to be viewed on the World Wide Web, and were international conventions set up for the use of HTML.
The manufacturers of browser programmes (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, etc.) comply with these conventions to a large extent, but at the same time try to stand out from the rest by creating extra features. The result: more and more techniques are frequently applied on the web, while not standardly supported by all browsers.
The developers of QwikZite strive for keeping the programme compatible with older and newer versions of the various browsers as much as possible.
QwikZite is set up in such way that users do not have to bother about HTML. HTML encoding of the user input is done by the programme automatically.
The use of hand-made HTML codes in texts, however, offers many extra possibilities for the users of QwikZite. It ranges from simple text style to more advanced options such as inserting tables.
More information about using HTML: see Working with HTML.
For a list of most common browsers: see Useful software.
Reader behaviour
Reading from a screen is done 25% slower than reading from paper. And it has turned out that people do not really read but actually 'scan' web pages: they 'pick up' some words or phrases from the text and then quickly go on to another page.
Hence, when developing a site, never make an exact copy of your brochure out of it, but adjust the structure of your texts and position the hyperlinks into agreement with this specific reader behaviour.
More information: see Working with webtext.
Go to top | Font face and font size | Colors | Images and file size | Screen resolution | HTML and browser compatibility | Reader behaviour
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