| Graphics cause file bloat. Remember, half of the world is still using dial-up connections. It's common for people to leave a site before it even finishes loading.
Text images are sometimes appropriate for snippets of text such as buttons, but not for large blocks of text. Designers who want to use fancy, nonstandard fonts sometimes attempt to circumvent the issue of browser compatibility by making the text an image. While a few judiciously chosen areas of text images are fine in most cases, a Web site based on graphics is problematic for several reasons: Graphics cause file bloat. Remember, half of the world is still using dial-up connections and has low patience for sites that load slowly. It's common for people to leave a site before it even finishes loading. Even if you're planning to use graphical buttons and headers, think about how many you'll have on your site and multiply that by the file size of each element. It could add up to be very a large amount. When it comes to reducing file size, don't underestimate the power of plain HTML. It's also easier to make changes to HTML text. Graphics-based text is not searchable, and we repeatedly hear people complain when they can't search for words on Web sites. PDF documents and sites that have graphics-based content are flat, making it nearly impossible for people to use the Search feature on their browsers. Graphical text is not selectable. When doing research, people like to select an area of content and paste it in a program such as Word for future reference or printing. Also, it's common for people to copy an address and paste it into mapping programs to get driving directions. Graphical text doesn't scale. Even if the text on your Web site is resizable, the graphics remain the same size. Screen readers can't readily read graphical text. Alternate text must be specified for the text to be read by the screen reader.
Make sure the areas that people may want to copy and paste, such as addresses, are selectable. The Flash-based version of this site neglects to make the content on this page selectable. There is an icon for a printer-friendly version of the page, but it will be missed because its design is too obscure and it is far away from the main area of the page. Even worse, the site overtakes the browser window, robbing people of their browser controls.  www.bacararesort.com |
