Poor Choices are Ruining the Web

A recent article by John Naughton has sparked a debate inside the web design and web development community. Are designers, with their image heavy designs, ruining the web?

The answer is yes, but its not why you think. It’s not because designers use big images or even that they use a lot of images. It’s because they are creating and using images poorly.

I get it. Your name is Chris and you spell it Criss. You have a Mac. You wear trendy clothes. You are an awesome web designer. I’m happy to have you on the team.

The problem is you suck at it. Not your art or your design. You are probably awesome at that. Believe me, I’m hardly qualified to judge art. What you suck at is taking your beautiful design and delivering it to your website’s visitors in an efficient way which creates an excellent experience. And that’s what’s ruining the web.

Now I want to see your awesome design. I truly do. Because you have a gift that I don’t to take ideas and visualize how they should look. Even better, you have the skill to express those design ideas in ways that I can only imagine. And often, all I can do is imagine, because when I visit your webpage, all I see is a white screen as my browser downloads megabytes of content.

As Aaron Gustafson says:

"Graphic designers are not ruining the web, but a lack of web professionalism is. Without proper training and an appreciation of the ramifications of each decision that goes into building a website, you more than likely won’t make the right decision regarding optimising the user experience. This isn’t print and it’s not television – bandwidth is a factor."

I couldn’t agree more with Aaron more. What we need here is professionalism and ownership. Performance is not someone else’s responsibility. Performance is your responsibility. Your job doesn’t stop when you create that PSD file. You are creating a User Experience, which is far more that the visual characteristics of your design. You are responsible for the experience of actually engaging with the design.

This is why I’m so glad this discussion started in the middle of our Lose the Wait series. As we have seen, you can lose webpage wait time by shedding page weight. And images are contributing the largest portion of total page weight.

We at Zoompf have made posts and given presentations all about this in the past. There is a lot that can be done to make sure the experience you give to your visitors reflects all the effort and skill that when into the design.

But lets apply some focus. Forget all the things that can be done to optimize images. Lets focus on a single thing. It’s easy to do. It’s obvious to check if it has been done. It has serious and immediate effects. It’s even something you can do right now.

Removing Image Bloat

Image files can contain all sorts of data inside of them that has nothing to do with the rendering of the image. This should not be news. In fact, I even wrote about it last Friday. While the types of non-graphical data present vary with each file format, a few examples are:

  • Unused palette entries
  • Embedded thumbnails
  • Meta data
  • Comments
  • Application settings
  • Camera information

Take a photo of something? Edit it in Photoshop? Well now it has an embedded thumbnail in it hitching along and taking up space. Be careful now! You might accidentally posted naked pictures of yourself to the Internet if you aren’t careful. Talk about a user experience.

So how much can this help? Is this a tempest in a teapot? No. Research shows the average savings by losslessly optimizing an image is 15-20%. That means 1 bytes out of every 4 bytes of an image is wasted bloat.

All of this sounds kinda of amateurish doesn’t it? Is this something novices do or are professional designers at real websites doing this to.

Lets try and experiment. Go check out Best Buy’s website. See those images. The images are bloated by 32% with this non-graphical gunk. 9 months ago, Twitter had the same problem.

Fixing the Problem

There two things we need to think about to fix this problem: finding a way to get rid of the bloat now, and finding a way to make sure we get of it consistently in the future.

The first part is easy. All the tools to optimize images are free. Even better, Chris Sullo of Nikto fame wrote Site Crunch, a script that lets you automatically run image optimization tools over your entire website.

The second part is more challenging. Bloated images get on a website, even when the designer knows better, because of your processes, or lack thereof. Marketing needs this image now, so it goes out the door fast and it doesn’t get optimized. Designers optimize their images, but the product catalog images they get from a 3rd party don’t get optimized. Organizations need a clear policies or procedures about how images and other assets are placed on a production site. Optimization should be incorporated into that process. That is how to fix the problem long term. Ideally, it becomes an automated step in the publish-to-production process. How to do that is another post in and of itself.

Summary

I love designers. You do things I could never do and make the web a better place. But when you create your design without thinking about the other half of the equation, the actual experience of getting that content, you sell yourself and your design short. And that is what’s ruining the web.

Want to see what performance problems your website has? Unoptimzied GIFs, PNGs, and JPEGs are just 3 of the nearly 400 performance issues Zoompf detects when testing your web applications. You can get a free performance scan of you website now. Need more performance goodness? Try our Zoompf WPO product.

This entry was posted in random and tagged best practice, images. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

See Zoompf in Action

Watch a demo of Zoompf WPO

How Fast Is...?

See the performance analysis video for Twitter

Zoompf WPO Data Sheet

Download the datasheet describing Zoompf WPO

Recent Posts

  • Poor Choices are Ruining the Web
  • Lose The Wait: Optimizing GIF Images
  • How Fast is… Target.com
  • Lose the Wait: HTTP Compression
  • Zoompf’s Concerns about SOPA and PIPA

Archives

  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • March 2011
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.