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Articles
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Theatre Websites: Some MinutiaeDateline: 27th February, 2000 I took my first faltering steps online in 1996. Even then most of my time was spent looking at theatre sites: now I have no time for anything other than theatre sites, not if I am to do my British Theatre Guide job properly! In these last four years I have seen an enormous improvement in almost every aspect of theatre on the Web. Design is so much better: people have begun to realise that a well-designed site is easy to read and attracts visitors back time and time again. We have seen the last - I hope! - of sites which use every colour of the rainbow on every page. No longer do Webmasters/mistresses think that using a different colour for every letter (ouch!) makes an effective headline. Less and less do we see text running right across the screen: now it is being organised into narrower, more easily read columns by the careful use of tables. And thank goodness the vogue for white (or, worse, coloured) text on black backgrounds seems to be dying. It was much too difficult to read more than a very few sentences. Eye strain does not add to the Internet experience! However there are still some faults which occur rather too frequently, faults which can spoil the experience of visitors. Let's take a look at some of them. Graphical Gaucherie Graphics take longer to download than text, and large graphics can take forever. So why do many sites still use them unnecessarily? There are still an awful lot of people who will scan newspaper reviews and upload them as jpeg or gif files. Yes, it saves time typing them out, but it keeps visitors waiting far too long - if they bother to wait at all! And the fact is that scans of newspapers look poor on screen. When reading a newspaper, we tend to forget the poor quality of the type and the yellowish colour of the paper, but when we see them on-screen, they make reading more difficult. And why do so few make use of the Width and Height image tags? If you use them, the visitor's browser will leave the right amount of space as it downloads the text first. If you don't, the browser will leave an "average" sort of space and then, once the image starts to download, the text will jump around the screen as the broswer adjusts the size of the space. How many times have I been in the midst of reading a piece of text and suddenly it vanishes, or jumps further up or down the screen, depending on the actual image size? The answer is: far too often! Thoughtful Webmasters/mistresses use thumbnails, and make use of the ALT image tags, so that when the cursor passes over the thumbnail, a little note that says "Click to see a full-size image" pops up. Really thoughtful people will also give the size of the full image so we can estimate how long it will take for the full image to appear. That gives us the option of peering at the thumbnail or choosing to spend some time downloading the image. If the Webmaster or mistress really wants to consider the visitor, (s)he will choose progressive jpegs or interlaced gifs so that we will see the image forming before our eyes, rather than sitting there wondering whether it's ever going to appear! And one final image question: is your animation really necessary? Do we really need to see a pen write on a piece of paper, which then folds itself up, pops itself into an envelope and posts itself? Would we not be better off with a little text link which says "email"? Murder by Music Do Web pages really need a musical background? If you're an amateur operatic society and you want us to hear the finale from your latest show, fine, but what conceivable purpose can a generic midi file serve? I visited a site the other day on every page of which there was a different piece of music played, and for the life of me I could not see what any of it had to do with the subject of the site! Lord preserve us from muzak on the Web! I have no objection to being given the option of downloading music files, but I really do object to having them forced upon me! Naff Navigation Don't you hate it when you have to return to a main page just so you can move on to another part of the site? Can the site's author not be bothered to put links to the rest of the site on each page? No? Then why should I bother to visit his b______ site? To me, that shows a real contempt for the visitor - or total thoughtlessness. The job of the author/designer is to make the visitor's experience of the site as pleasant as possible, and that means providing ways of moving from page to page without having to backtrack all the time. Mail Me! Almost every site I have visited has an email link and an invitation to contact the author. Great! That's the way it should be. However, in seven cases out of ten, when I have accepted the invitation, my email has been ignored. I received an email last week, asking some questions which I couldn't answer. So I wrote back to say so. I then received a reply which said something along the lines of "Wow! an answer! Thank you for taking the time to reply, even if you couldn't help." Quite obviously this person had had bad experiences of emailing to Websites. My own custom is to reply to an email, whenever possible, within 24 hours. The longest 99% of my correspondents have to wait is 48 hours. It doesn't matter whether the original asks a question, makes a criticism, gives a compliment, I will reply. It's only common courtesy, after all. Please do not be one of the seventy percent who ignore emails. Saying the Same What is your Website for? We have, I think, passed that period of time when so-called "personal" sites proliferated. No longer are we treated to sites of the "This is a picture of me. This is my wife. This is my child. This is my budgie" nature. Thank goodness for that. Now there is a proliferation of sites named "Joe Bloggs", "The Joe Bloggs Appreciation Society", "Winnie's Joe Bloggs Shrine", "The Joe Bloggs Worship Site", and so on, ad nauseam. Now that's fine if they're all different, but all too often they present the same pictures (only in a different order) and re-hash the same information. Then they link to each other's sites and thank each other for being so wonderful and providing this, that or the other. It's the Web equivalent of kids writing "Winnie WAL Joe 4eva" on their exercise books! If you're going to create another site devoted to Ken Branagh, Anthony Hopkins, Ralph Fiennes etc., please don't make it the same as everyone else's. Pretty please... Be different! Be imaginative! Be creative! I want to go to a Website and say, "Wow! This is good! This is so different from the rest!" The last thing I want to think is, "I've been here before," when I haven't! Part 2: Content Articles Indices:
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