Paul Butzi Photography

[This article was written in 2004. Since then, things have changed a bit. After reading this article, you may find it helpful to read this article, too]

Introduction

Several years ago, I put together a fairly stream of consciousness rambling about the lessons learned putting together my photographic web site. That article can be found at www.butzi.net/articles/website.htm. It was originally written in August, 2000. I've updated it several times, mostly to make the statistics more current, but there have been no real substantive changes in the content.

This is an addendum to that article. In some cases, my understanding of the WWW and the structure and purpose of web sites has evolved; in other cases, the WWW itself is a different 'place' from what it was when the first article was written. Four years have gone by, and we're past due for an update.

Changes in the WWW

In many ways, the World Wide Web is fundamentally different from what it was back in 2000. Search engines have evolved, both to do a better job for people using them and to thwart the efforts of web site owners to skew the results by various subterfuges. The WWW is simply a much bigger place than it was four years ago. Browsers have advanced by leaps and bounds, offering not only new technology for providing content (including streaming audio, streaming video, flash animation, DHTML, server and client side scripting, etc.) but also in providing ways for the viewer to better control the browsing experience.

As each of these new technologies came into existence, each has passed through the same life cycle:

The new technology is introduced.

Cutting edge web designers rapidly embrace the technology in order to produce ever more fancy and jazzy web sites.

Viewers are forced to either abandon the web sites that rely on the technology or update their systems by downloading a new browser or an add-in to view the new content.

The initial flush of excitement wears off. Web designers realize that their initial use of the technology was tacky, pointless, and gratuitous. Web sites are revised to either use the technology only where appropriate, or else abandon the technology altogether.

Beyond this, costs have fallen dramatically. Quality web site hosting is now widely available at minimal cost. Web design software (like Frontpage 2003) has improved dramatically, making it easier and faster to build a web site.

Client side computers have grown more capable, as well. Display size and resolution for current consumer level machines have improved dramatically. In 2000, when the original article was written, the vast majority of visitors to a web site were viewing it on a CRT perhaps 14" diagonally, with a resolution of 640x480. Today, the most common screen is probably 17" diagonally and at least 800x600 resolution, with larger and higher resolution displays gaining ground rapidly.

New Lessons (and old lessons repeated)

In the intervening four years since I wrote the original article, I've learned a few lessons about the WWW. They can be summed up as follows:

The web is not an electronic book.

The fact that old web sites were designed for 640x480 means that most old web sites are due for an overhaul to display sensibly on higher resolution screens

The search engine to care about 4 years ago was Altavista. The search engine to care about now is Google.

A photographic web site needs to be aware of image indexing services like Google Image Search, etc.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a great thing. You should revamp your web site to use CSS; it will simplify your life, save you time and effort, and improve the consistency of your web site.

Until everyone has a T1 connection or faster, the dream of the WWW being a multi-media extravaganza is still a pipe dream. For now, text and static images are still king. Viewers don't LIKE things that whiz around on their screen.

The WWW is not a book

In a book, the author and editor contrive to make the best possible decisions about every variable. Not only is content subject to great editorial scrutiny, but every aspect of the graphic design is controlled by the folks publishing the book - graphic design, the exact layout, type style, type size, how the type is set, what paper the book is printed upon - the list is endless. The WWW is not like this, because not only is it not possible for the author/publisher to control many of these variables, the web is a place where many of those variables are explicitly under the control of the viewer.

Some (many, maybe even most) web sites try to set the absolute font size. Generally, they set it to be reasonable (or maybe a bit small) for a lower resolution monitor, with the result that the web site is unreadable on a high resolution monitor. Setting absolute font size is a Very Bad Idea, because it conflicts with the idea behind the WWW - "The publisher provides the content and make suggestions about presentation. The viewer controls how things are displayed."

On the web, all of the technologies for ensuring that the viewer sees exactly what you want her to see are obnoxious and bad. A good example is PDF - Adobe's answer to ensuring that something looks the same no matter what. In the beginning, PDF was bad because search engines couldn't index PDF content. Now they can, but PDF is still bad because it's slow, requires a plug-in to work, and the plug-in is obnoxious and slow. If you want to provide PDF versions of documents that can easily be printed, fine. Just don't think people will like it when your entire website is done in PDF files, because they won't.

Another good example is complicated Java scripts. More and more people are turning Java off in their browsers because of security concerns, so if you use it, your site is broken for those folks. Worse, the most common use of Java is to build spiffy interesting user interfaces, and this means that you're not meeting the big expectation of your viewers - namely, that they can navigate your site without having to learn an entire new user interface. Everyone understands hyperlinks. Not everyone understands that that glowing, pulsating blob on the screen will do something when you mouse over it, and that clicking on it will launch a new window to transport them to some new multi-media experience.

As display devices become larger, it becomes even more important to make layout choices (and font choices, and font size choices) only in a general way, and let the user control the rest. On a 640x480 monitor, virtually everyone browsed things with the browser maximized. On a 21" display with 1600x1200 or higher resolution, virtually no one will use the entire screen for a browser window. The window might be 640x480, or it might be 1500x300, or it might be 800x1000. You can't make choices because you don't have any information.

Web sites designed for 640x480 need an overhaul

In the bad old days, the advice was to design your web site so it worked well when viewed on a 640x480 monitor. Those days are long gone. People are buying LCD monitors with native resolution of 1600x1200 or higher, and when your fixed layout web site is viewed on that monitor, it looks stupid - a little 640x480 bit of stuff floating in a big window. Those 100 pixel wide thumbnails which looked about right on a 640x480 monitor (and would download quickly on a slow modem) are now too small to see on a big screen. Make that 'WAY too small to see on a big screen'. As connection speeds rise thumbnails need to be bigger. Layouts need to adapt to windows of sizes ranging from 800x600 to 2048x1536.

Fonts that look ok at 640x480 are too small to see at 2048x1536. Don't set absolute font size - user 'larger' and 'smaller' to size things relatively.

In 2000, it was Altavista. In 2004, it's Google.

The point here isn't that before you were doing things to get indexed well by Altavista, and now you should be doing it for Google. Heck, the way to be indexed well for Google has changed in four years, too.

The points are that:

You can't just let your web site go static, because this will lead to inevitable dropoff in viewership and lower page rank with search engines. You've got to keep up, at least yearly, with what the search engines expect you to do to get indexed well.

Don't place all your eggs in one basket. Google may be king now, but next year, it may be (will be) someone else.

A photographic site needs to be aware of image indexing services.

Google (and other search engines) now have image indexing services along with text indexing. This means that they will scan your web site, make copies of all the images, and will supply smaller versions of your image (along with a pointer to the full sized image). This is a fast path for people who intend to violate your copyright, as well as a fast path to someone who wants to buy your image.

For some time now, I've used META tags to prevent Google from indexing my images. So far, Google has not deleted the images from their cache. My response was to just change the URL for every image.

In any case, you need to decide on a policy about indexing images and what you're going to do, and then implement it with robots.txt and META tags to make sure you get what you want.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a great thing.

Four years ago, CSS was around but lots of browsers didn't support it fully. The browser world has largely shaken out, and browsers now offer pretty good CSS support.

This is good news, because CSS makes it much easier to get formatting and layout consistency across your web site, and to make global changes to every single page with great ease.

For now, text and static images are still king.

It's easy to build a website with lots of little animated things in it - much easier than it was four years ago. Even things like video are within the reach of everyday builders of small web sites.

That's the good news. The bad news is that studies show that people actually IGNORE things which blink or move on the screen, because the blinking and moving has been so overexploited by advertisers trying to get attention.

Beyond that, mostly that stuff just looks tacky. With the exception of having things brighten when you mouse over them (rollovers) to show that they're active parts of the interface (see the menu bar at the top of this page) I think that text and static images are still king.