Web Directions

Image is everything

• In: Blog
• By:John
• April 7, 2008
• Leave a response

One seri­ous draw­back of mov­ing house in Australia is you’ll typ­i­cally wait no small time to get your inter­net con­nec­tion moved. For the last three weeks, I’ve been in this sit­u­a­tion, and as con­nec­tion is not an option, I’ve needed and alter­na­tive until some­one could be both­ered pro­vid­ing me with a ser­vice which frankly should be close to essen­tial as water or elec­tric­ity these days no?

So, I opted for a 3G USB modem for my laptop.

Living as I do at the edge of the net­work, it’s been slow — like dialup slow — which has neces­si­tated all kinds of tricks like turn­ing off images when brows­ing to load pages in an even remotely accept­able time frame.

Which makes for an inter­est­ing user experience.

Most sites are close to unus­able in this state, in my expe­ri­ence of the last three weeks. Time and again I’ve found myself turn­ing images back on, reload­ing a page, then turn­ing them off again in order to find a basic but­ton or instruc­tion. Some of the big names who you’d expect to do bet­ter, like Basecamp, and Wordpress (2.3 login) are guilty of this. But most sites have siz­able chunks of their nav­i­ga­tion, and user inter­face dis­abled once images are.

To tell the truth, in 2008, it’s a shock and a dis­ap­point­ment to find so many sites rely­ing on images for their user expe­ri­ence. Even basic things like alter­nate text is miss­ing on images that are blocks of text at site after site.

I’m happy to say our sites (west­civ and web direc­tions) fair rea­son­ably well.

So, how do your sites do?

4 responses to “Image is everything”:

1. • By:Ben Boyle
   • April 8th, 2008
   

   oh man… you should try *liv­ing* in a “fringe” loca­tion where there’s wait­ing, and the pos­si­bil­ity of more wait­ing (8 years here) … at least you’re in an “inter­est­ing but hope­fully tem­po­rary” sit­u­a­tion. Are you get­ting a healthy dose of packet loss too? That is one of the more inter­est­ing affects to observe with wire­less con­nec­tiv­ity… when links start result­ing in ran­dom “server not found” due to packet loss between you and the DNS, a key css or js file may or may not have been (suc­cess­fully) fetched, Web 2.0 apps repeat­edly pop in to tell you ‘oops’ this or ‘lost’ that (like you need those reminders)… well, you know you’re not in kansas any­more… or any­where really ~:)

   thank­fully it isn’t always that bad. but you’ll strike a patch like that every day or two, or every cou­ple of hours, depends on the weather or some­thing. Still pay a pre­mium for the service :)

   You’re very right, design­ers should be more aware of these issues. Especially here in .au

2. • By:john Allsopp
   • April 8th, 2008
   

   Ben,

   oh yeah, I reckon packet loss is the big prob­lem with this — the­o­ret­i­cal through­put is all well and good, but the pack­ets have to all make it!

   The town I live in (offi­cially a sub­urb of Sydney, but 25km by road from any­where) is well enough ser­viced by tel­cos, but a few of us here are keen to share our wifi and make the whole place a cloud of free inter­net access. Is that fea­si­ble for where you are?

   john

3. • By:Leah Maclean
   • April 8th, 2008
   

   I think that with today being CSS Naked Day (started by http://​www​.dustin​diaz​.com) issues such as the abil­ity to nav­i­gate with all images off, and with­out any styling at all, should be brought to the fore and more so called web2.0 and design busi­nesses pull back the cov­ers and really see what the sites are like with­out the CSS and images.

4. • By:Stephanie
   • April 10th, 2008
   

   I had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence in rural Quebec a few months ago. Facebook was vir­tu­ally unus­able, I couldn’t believe it.

   I think image replace­ment tech­niques are con­tribut­ing to the prob­lem since the eas­i­est ones hide the text off screen. I’m lead­ing the project to re-​​do the tem­plates for BCIT and pick­ing a good image replace­ment tech­nique took a lot of look­ing around.

   Bad tools can some­times be to blame too. We’ve been work­ing hard with our con­tent con­trib­u­tors to get them to fill in alt tags but many of them only update their sites twice a year so can’t remem­ber all the picky details like what “alt” means, and our CMS can’t enforce it. If you ask Dreamweaver to enforce it it gives you a tiny lit­tle text field to fill in that’s never long enough.

   Maybe in addi­tion to CSS Naked Day we need a day when all devel­op­ers are forced to use dial up ;)

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