greg smart

I have been working to complete an overdue project this week and have a customer that keeps going back and forth on design elements. This can often be a frustrating time in the design process for both sides in this development equation. In addition to dealing with design issues I have also been trying to communicate with our Project Manager, Graphic Designer, and Content Developer as to how the requested changes impact the the process and ultimately the end product.

I pasted a portion of an email below that I think highlights the struggles and technical challenges web developers face as they try and bring a project to fruition.

Okay, I have finished another round of changes. I just wanted to think out loud with this email, I figured we could approach this as an opportunity to help illuminate some of the issues we struggle with on our side (Development). The client wanted the new images larger, so we have now made them 25% larger. Apparently the client has a large monitor that he runs on a high resolution and keeps asking for changes related to how he is viewing the site. This is beginning to cause some issues that the team should be cognoscente of and we should attempt to educate the client, especially if he requests more changes like these:

1. The Fold - I know that we (web nerds) say this should be a non-issue. On most web pages it is good practice to disregard the fold since monitor resolution varies so widely, this is generally regarded as a print concept that is not necessarily applicable to the web. While I subscribe to this concept I think in this case it is coming to bear. I use a 1024px X 728px monitor resolution and about half of the image rotation is below the fold. This means that the full effect of the home page image rotation will be lost on the majority of the visitors to the site, unless they have an unusually high monitor resolution. What I expect to happen here is that the client will start getting feedback from other decision makers on his team and he will ask us to change it back once again.
2. Image Quality - This is actually a double whammy (#3). I had to compress the images to find a happy medium between page performance and image quality. I don’t want to decrease it further.
3. Page Performance - Image size(s) directly impacts page performance. I have decreased the image sizes as much as I can. I think the page performance is suffering somewhat, but it is always a balancing act.
4. Accessibility - This is closely associated with #3. We spend a lot of our time creating code that is as standards compliant as a site can be while still meeting the requested design criteria. As the page performance decreases so does site accessibility. I would imagine that anyone on a limited-bandwidth internet connection will have some difficulty viewing this site. The images in the rotation are around 500kb/.5MB and they will have to view a partially rendered page until all of the images are downloaded.

Bookmarks: