They say that a picture is worth 1000 words, and in the world of the Internet, where your web host charges you for the amount of data transferred from the server to your customers, that is very literally true. Some site hosts promise unlimited data transfer (at least in theory), but most providers charge huge fees if you exceed some predetermined limit. When pictures take 20k-bites and more, getting a visually interesting site without the a huge data transfer cost requires some planning and some really neat tricks.
Here are nine tricks to help your site become more visually appealing without running up the download costs.
Trick 1- Use White Space. Want a lighter, airier look? White space costs next to nothing, makes text easier to read, and helps break up a page into visually appealing chunks. The easiest way to create white space is by using paragraph marks separated by the symbol for a blank space. That provides only horizontal gaps through vertical text, so instead, arrange your content in tables with hefty “cell padding” and “cell spacing” and with border width set to zero. And on top of that, feel free to leave some of the table cells blank.
Trick 2 – Use CSS Filters Want fancy graphic-looking headline? Cascading style sheets let you specify filters for your test that makes it blur, drop shadow, and more. Simple text becomes downright graphical. Choose your fonts and sizes to enhance your site, then make them glow.
Trick 3 – Cut Quotes Want a word picture? Magazines do this trick regularly. Take a piece of the page’s text content that is interesting, make it extra large (and maybe even bold italics) and treat it like a graphical element. It’s a simple matter to set this in a table cell and wrap the smaller text around it.
Trick 4 – Color Blocks Want a splash of color? Set the background color of some of the cells to different colors. The color blocks can highlight text or the text can flow around it as you prefer, creating a neat visual effect.
Trick 5 – Textures Want a big picture for the data transfer cost of a small one? The backgrounds of table cells (or the whole table for that matter) can be set to a relatively small graphic which is repeated over and over, just like the background of the entire page. What’s neater is that you can put text over that if you want!
Trick 6 – Borders Want a larger picture? A modest sized picture can be framed by a color border, either using the border option in the image tag or by putting the picture inside a colored table cell. This makes the picture look larger. (If picture quality isn’t important, you can force a picture to stretch by specifying a width or height larger than the original.)
Trick 7 – Symbols Want a simple heart, airplane, or horoscope symbol on your page? Here’s an easy way to make them. Almost every computer comes with Wingdings, Webdings, and Symbol fonts. One of those symbols may be exactly what you need as an illustration. Set the font face and size to make it interesting. Use any other fonts at your own risk, since the font needs to be on the reader’s computer for them to see it.
Trick 8 – Repeat Images If you repeat an image on a page, it only needs to download once. You can flip the image and do tricks to it using the CSS filters so that it’s not the same image over and over.
Trick 9 – Blockbuster Tip! — Borrowed bandwidth. No, I’m not recommending bandwidth theft. There are some websites that WANT you to download their images directly from their sites as your page is downloading. This data transfer counts against their host, not yours. Which ones? Advertisers. Some advertisers have advertisements that are almost indistinguishable from art (and some literally are art). If you have a kayak site, then sell kayak posters. If you have a pet site, they have pet photos. And, not only do they provide pictures for your site, if someone buys a from the ad, you get paid a commission! There are lots of great affiliate programs that provide pictures of their products that also make great website content, so choose your favorite.
If you would like to see my Sponsored Links
box, look for it on the lower left side of every page of
Rhode Island Roads magazine at http://riroads.com . Feel
free to give it a test run, it only costs a buck!
