Don't overlook bandwidth, web-safe colors

5. Pay close attention to bandwidth

In your desire to achieve a good-looking entry page, don’t overlook the bandwidth problem. Your beautifully designed home page may take too long to open and drive away your audience. Why? Too many memory hugging graphics adorn your sites. Most graphic professionals know how to get around this problem but you have to discuss the bandwidth limit at the start.

A good rule of thumb is 40 to 60 kb web pages for most visitors and dial-up accounts. It can be higher for business-to-business web sites with faster access and robust server. If your product is for the general public and not concerned about appeal, work on 25kb and the whole Internet world is yours to invite.

6. Choose your colors wisely

There are two things you need to remember about colors: their meaning and web-safe colors.

Colors are many things to different people. The colors you choose create emotion. They can be soothing or exciting, stirring or calming. Choose colors that properly communicate your message, your product or service. Green can express optimism. Navy blue means conservatism. Red reminds us of excitement. While colors have favorable meanings, they can convey negative emotions too. Green can mean greed, blue for depression, red for aggression.

Did you know that there are only 216 colors that can be correctly displayed in any computer monitor? We call this web-safe colors. While it is not possible to create all your colors into this color palette, you must make sure safe colors are used on large areas of your page. For instance, your background, table and text colors will display consistently if you use web-compatible ones.

With dedicated Web graphics softwares like Adobe ImageReady or Macromedia Fireworks, you can now achieve colors as close as possible to acceptable colors. These can help you a lot on color management and consistency from page to page.