Lastly, possibly, is consideration of some of the constraints encountered
when designing a web site, notably bandwidth and screen resolution.
The device being used to view the web site may be connected to the Internet
via a low bandwidth connection and the user will get discouraged if pages
take a long time to download and appear on the screen. Therefore, any images
on the web site should either be scaled to fit a small screen or a thumbnail
of the image should be displayed, clicking on which downloads the full image.
Because images are, initially anyway, viewed at a lower resolution, they need
to be fairly bold since intricate detail will not be visible.
There is no control over what sort of device is being used to view the web
page; a desktop PC with a big display, laptop with a smaller display, tablet computer
with a yet smaller, though possibly higher resolution, sreen, or a mobile phone with
a smaller screen again. There are a number of techinques used to cope with this
diversity of devices. Big web sites such as newpapers or on-line stores serve up
different web pages for each device, the web pages generated on the fly from a database.
This is, of course, expensive to build and maintain. Small scale web sites cannot
do this. They can try and maintain two versions of the web site, one for mobile devices
and one for the rest, but the maintence complexity more than doubles. The compromise is,
usually, to build a web site which more or less works with all devices, being
constrained within a narrow layout which appears as a centered column on big displays and
mostly fits smaller ones. Doing so does, however, mean the web pages have a fairly simple
layout which, in the end, is probably no bad thing.
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