[Rover] OT: web-pages

[Mike KA5CVH Urich]

Hey folks a few suggestions.

When building up your web-pages, please do not use the "convert to HTML"
function of MS programs such as Word, PP, or Excel!  Yes, I know that's what
every community college in the country teaches, but pulllease.  These
programs place way to much unnecessary code into a page which increases the
load times tremendously.  Something like 85% of the people in the US are
still on dial-up and the longer it takes for a page the load, the quicker
they are to move onto something else.  Ideally no page including all text
and photos etc should exceed 60k.  Just to let you know I'm guilty too ...
I've got a page that I'm just going to have to reduce the size of the
thumbnails because the page (with thumbnails) is approaching 100K now.

Also, standardize your fonts on a plain white background.  Not everyone may
have the same font packages as you, and while certain background and font
color combinations may look, "kewl", in your browser, with your video card
and monitor, they may not look all that great on other computers.  Keep
things simple, I'm one who believes that ham radio web-pages are to share
and exchange information, and not to display our html skills (or the lack
thereof).  Basic html is really quite easy and even fun.  Check out
http://www.htmlgoodies.com for html coding tips.  Also if you want to see
what someone else did to code a page, just right click in an open part of
the page, left click on "view source" and you'll see the code for the page.

Lastly, remove unnecessary product logo links (get IE, get NS, get Adobe,
the time, the temp etc etc ad nauseum) these too also increase the load time
of your pages.  I have all the software I need and if I want to know what
the weather is where you live I'll go look it up on intellicast.com.

Think along the lines of Joe Friday, "the facts m'aam, just the facts"  End
of rant ... y'all have a great Labor Day.

Mike Urich,   KA5CVH
www.ka5cvh.com
LaPorte TX   EL-29