If you can remember back to a time when you weren't involved in radio and were just a civilian, you likely didn't notice all the small mistakes on the air that now drive shivers up your spine. Nowadays, you can't listen to any station, let alone your own, without breaking it down and picking out the flaws. For web designers, we see the same thing. We notice the little things on other sites - and it is very common to find such problems on radio station sites since many of them beyond the top markets are handled by people who aren't full-time designers. Today's column is a little help to avoid some of those pitfalls. If you've been doing this for awhile, it will be old hat, but its still important.

Despite the all the talk about the growth of multimedia on the web, including video, audio and Flash, the heart of the web is still text and images. When the Mosaic browser first came onto the scene in 1993, it allowed images to appear on web pages. Before this point, most people accessed the internet through proprietary services like AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy (remember them?). Mosaic freed people from these services and allowed people to post and read information along with images just by getting access to the internet.

The advantage that text and images have over video and audio on the web is that people are very impatient when it comes to websites. They hate load time and they hate waiting for things to buffer. Even if high speed connections allow visitors to minimize those annoyances, audio and video still take place at their own pace, not at the pace of the user. With text and images, you can quickly scan an entire page with your eyes and focus on the important or interesting parts (which is how people read web pages) instead of waiting for the video to get interesting. In fact, you likely scanned the bold text before you read the actual paragraph.

Inserting images in a web page is so basic that it is often one of the first things beginners learn how to do. Unfortunately, the next thing they usually learn after inserting images in HTML is how to resize images in HTML - something that anyone who works on a web page should NEVER, EVER do. Now, I did not say that images should not be resized - it is important to shrink large images so that they do not interrupt the flow of the page. If you need to show a large image in detail to users, link to it from a smaller thumbnail image and put the larger image on its own page. Here are a few examples of common mistake with images in HTML and resizing.

If you have an image that is too big, it distracts from the rest of the text and halts the flow of the page:

Any attempt to wrap text around it leads to this ugliness. Asuperlongwordcanreally wreak havoc with the page and be bumped down below the image. (Text wrapping is achieved by assigning a style="float:left;" to an image, which lets the text drape around the side of the image - much like water in a river hitting a rock and flowing around.)