The Web Designer's Pre-Flight Checklist

1. What is the importance of flexibility in design?
Flexibility in design is important because Websites constantly change, so if you find that putting in a new navigation button is going to take a lot of work, you have to reconsider your design. You should be able to freely add and remove elements from your pages with little to no trouble.

2. Usability , accessibility, what’s the difference and what is usability?
In web design, usability is referring to how easy someone can get around your website ... how usable is it. If someone has to 'hunt' for your 'home' link or your contact information, then you have a usability problem. Accessibility refers to the ability of other users to access your site. If your site is accessable, people with disabilities or using older technology based computers can still view your site. Thus usability looks at a site's ease of use while accessability looks at site's universal user-friendliness or reach.

3. What is the maximum page weight as a rule of thumb, and how is it calculated?
The page weight should should be no more than 60kB - images and all. People will leave your site quickly if your site takes over 10 seconds to load on a 56kB modem.

4. Give an example of when the previous rule might be broken.
Web sites that incorporate animation or movie broadcasts using multimedia software such as "Flash," can easily surpass the recommended page weight.

5. There is a plethora of tools out there for building websites, what are the criteria you would use in choosing you tools.
You need to let the goal of the website dictate what technology you are going to use and not what the flavour of the month happens to be at the time. For example, intelligent use of technology means using "Flash" when it makes sense, not because you want a 'cool' intro!

6. Why is it important to convey the meaning of the website clearly and quickly.
Web Designers need to make sure that visitors easily know what's going on (and why) when they get to your Website, otherwise you won't be conveying your message too well. If this is the case, people will just leave your site.

7. Can you think of some ways of ensuring the previous?
Keep your site simple and brief. Distractions such as pop-up windows are not advisable nor emphasis on unrelated fancy artwork.

8. What is a 4th generation website?
A 4th generation web site is a web standards compliant website. It has all the elements of a 3rd generation web site along with the following:

1. The proper use of markup (HTML): only structural tags in the HTML, use of CSS, proper use of structural tags in the layout ( tag order in a document for example).
2. Respect to usability in web site design: using proven layouts.
3. Search engine aware web pages and web site.
4. Well structured - easily updateable.
5. Automatically printable with CSS media type linked CSS files.

9. What hardware is required to build websites, explain?
You don't need any special hardware to create web pages. Just a standard computer and an Internet connection so that you can put (upload) your websites onto the web - this assuming you want to get your websites on the web. Fortunately web design is not like 3D animation, where you need the latest and most powerful PC's to be competitive. These days home computers are so fast that even three, four-year-old PC's are more than enough to handle all your web design needs.

10. What are light images?
Light images are those that don't take forever to download. This means that light images use less computer storage/memory space or have small file sizes. Consequently, images used in web pages (and all screen graphics by the way) need to be reduced to a PPI (DPI) of 72 to 76, a big contrast to the usual 300 DPI when working in the print world.

11. That old question, how big is “light”?
The last several years of web experience has shown that if people have to wait more than 10 seconds to see your page, you can kiss most of your traffic goodbye. High speed Internet access is growing, but sadly still too many people are using dial-up connections. At present, the number of people on (slow) dial-up connection is about 60%. This number of course will vary from place to place, but the bottom line is that you should expect to have many surfers hitting your web pages at 56k or less. 56k is the speed of the fastest of dial-up modems you can expect, and 56k modems download at a speed of about 5.6 kilobytes per second. With this in mind, and the 10-second rule mentioned above, you can see that shooting to create pages under 60k (kilobytes) is a good idea.

12. What is Image optimization?
The heaviest aspects of most web pages are the images. Following the old 80/20 rule we should concentrate on making our images as light as possible without making them look ugly. The best way to keep your web pages 'light' is through image optimization. Hence, the process of 'lightening-up' an image is commonly referred to as 'optimization'.

13. Explain how we optimize our images.
Just about all the image editing programs out there (programs like Adobe Photoshop, Xara, Macromedia Fireworks) have the built in capability to output/create images that are as light as possible. These programs have special export filters that are designed to produce web-optimized images. When you start using image-editing software you will find that the process is pretty painless, though you will probably have to tweak things as you go along.

14. What criteria might be used to choose whether your image would be a gif or jpg?
A gif file extension is more appropriate where the image resembles a graphic or animation whereas a jpg file extension is more appropriate where the image resembles a photograph.

15. The old saying rules are made to be broken, does it apply in web design, explain.
There are always circumstances where rules may be broken. For example an artistic site may contain just one image replaced periodically. However, they rarely occur. Thus rules, developed and tested over time, are recommended to be adhered to.