The Checklist

fifteen questions to ask before you upload

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Print this out, put it next to your keyboard, and go down it every time you finish a page. It takes five minutes. My student workers do it for every page on the library's site before it goes up, and they grumble, and then they catch something every single time.

Weight

[  ] I added up the size of the page and every picture on it, and the total is under 50K. (In Windows, right-click each file and choose Properties. On a Mac, choose Get Info.)
[  ] Every picture has WIDTH and HEIGHT in its IMG tag, so the words can appear before the pictures finish.
[  ] No picture is bigger on the disk than it needs to be. Photographs are saved as JPEG, and drawings with a few flat colors are saved as GIF.
[  ] Every link to a big file says how big it is.

Noise and motion

[  ] Nothing plays a sound until somebody clicks on it.
[  ] Nothing blinks.
[  ] No more than one thing moves on any one screenful.

Reading

[  ] I can read every word from arm's length, including the links and the visited links.
[  ] Nothing is written on top of a busy background.
[  ] Every link says where it goes. The words "click here" are nowhere on the page.

Everybody else's computer

[  ] I turned pictures off and looked at the page. It still makes sense, and every picture's ALT text says something useful. (In Netscape 4: Edit, Preferences, Advanced, and uncheck "Automatically load images." In Internet Explorer 5: Tools, Internet Options, the Advanced tab, and uncheck "Show pictures." Remember to turn them back on.)
[  ] I looked at it in both Netscape and Internet Explorer.
[  ] I made my browser window small, about 640 pixels wide, and nothing important fell off the edge.
[  ] I made the text bigger in my browser and the page still holds together.

Getting around

[  ] Every page has a link back to my front page, and my name and e-mail address, so a stranger who lands in the middle can find the rest.

How long will they wait?

Here is roughly how long a page takes to arrive, counting the page and all of its pictures together. These are my own timings from home, on an ordinary evening, and a modem almost never runs at the speed printed on the box. A 56K modem is doing well to manage 44 or 48 on a phone line in the country, and on a busy night it's less.

Now count slowly to seventeen and imagine staring at a blank white screen the whole time. That's a 50K page on a 28.8, and a lot of pages I see every day are four times that.

The number I keep in my head is ten seconds. After about ten seconds of nothing, people start to wonder whether something is broken. After twenty, most of the patrons I watch have reached for the Back button.

Back to the Bill of Rights
Patrice Wilder · [email protected]
Last updated: Friday, September 24, 1999