Tips

Planning a Web site?

Good web sites do not just happen. They require meticulous planning. If you want to save yourself some money, carefully think through exactly what you want to show. Map it out. The more detailed you are, the better. For instance, what do you want your navigation categories to be? How will you organize pictures? Who is your audience? What is the message you want to convey?

Your message

When putting together your copy, do not expect bad grammar or spelling errors to be automatically corrected. If you are uncertain about how to convey your message, a good editor is worth a thousand words. Design Catcher can provide you with editorial and proofreading services.

Putting together your graphics

Your computer monitor cannot display more than 72 dots per inch (dpi). Most scanned photos are intended for printers and have much higher resolutions such as 300 dots per inch. This makes the file size prohibitively large and results in extremely slow picture loading times on the web. So when you gather your photos together make sure that they have a resolution of 72 dpi, are between 300 and 400 pixels wide and have a file size of not more than 50 kilobytes (K). If you do not know how to do image editing to get these results, Design Catcher can color correct, restore and resize your photos for a fee. Please be aware that combining color correcting, with restoring and resizing can be very time consuming.

The picture size below is 300 x 225 pixels. The resolution is 72 dpi. This high quality jpeg file is 30K, and loads in 12 seconds on a 28.8 modem. This same file will load in 6 seconds when saved as a medium quality jpeg, and the file size will shrink to15K

The picture size below is 400 x 300 pixels. The resolution is 72 dpi. This high quality jpeg is 47K, and loads in 17 seconds on a 28.8 modem. This same file will load in 9 seconds when saved as a medium quality jpeg, and the file size will shrink to 23K

The picture size below is 500 x 375 pixels. The resolution is72 dpi. This high quality jpeg is 66 K and loads in 24 seconds on a 28.8 modem. This image will load quickly on a cable modem or DSL line. The same file saved as a medium quality jpeg will load in 12 seconds on a 28.8 modem and size will shrink to 32.4K. A 12 second file loading time is acceptable to most people.