Customer Newsletter

Date: 30th August 1997

Hello onweb customers, and other potential customers...

An area that has received a number of questions from customers in recent times has been that of assisting webmasters with some resources. Well we’ve taken note of your comments and have embarked upon the preparation of a new resources page for those of you who design your own web materials. In the very near future you should see appearing a gradual expansion of useful materials.

In the first instance you will probably notice a basic index list of useful resources and the appropriate links appearing on our About page. Some of the links that will be included will cover areas such as

Graphics Tools
Animation Tools
Gallery Tools
Scripting Tools

To name just a few. As time passes additional categories and their links will be added. Naturally, if any of you have found a resource that you think others may find useful, then please let us know (email to webmaster@onweb.com.au), and we will add it to our links index once we have reviewed the site and feel that it is likely to be helpful to others.

An associated task that is happening in conjunction with this index page is the development of more FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and the relevant answers with regard to page development. Clearly we will not be able to have an answer for every product or tool in existence, and that is certainly not our intention for these FAQs. Rather, what we are hoping to do is to provide some more general hints that will assist people who are new to developing web pages, so that they can get started and begin to enjoy some success on their site. If you fit this category and would like to contribute ideas about what was important to you when you started building your site, please email them to webmaster@onweb.com.au where they will be incorporated into the FAQ list if possible.

One of the comment themes put to us about our own site concerns the lack of glitz. While a few of the comments have been negative, most have been very positive. We have deliberately not had lots of blinking, flashing, bannerised, animated, you-name-it styles included because we believe that our target audience is basically looking for quality information in the most efficient manner possible rather than wait for an entertainment suite before getting on to the details at hand. As well, our target market is also a more informed internet user, and has generally developed beyond the glitz and glamour appeal, although those features are important to liven up a site.

Our own experience, and that suggested by several of the internet writers, is that there seems to be a trend towards the more basic approach. This is due to a combination of factors, including the fact that the internet is growing, growing, growing so rapidly that your site has to compete with every other site on the internet; that consumers are maturing in their use of the internet – they are getting over the novelty stage where they are happy to sit and wait for pages to load; that the current technology can only deliver pages at current communication rates; that image transfer is a big limiting factor; that applet coding is still evolving; ...... and the list goes on. In general terms it seems that the rule of thumb that most people suggest is that you attempt to keep your page sizes as small as possible (under about 30K) so that your viewers do not have to wait too long while the page loads. Hence if you are using graphics images, try to keep each one as small as practicable, and not have too many on the one page. When scanning photographs, bear in mind that typical resolutions for web-published material are around the 100 – 150 dpi to give quite good results.

Until next time, happy (on)webbing

Neville Williams,
Director