And a revised Web page, too

Saturday morning I was at a friend’s house (T’s godmother, whom we have seen in absolute years) and I was trying to show her my family photo album Web page.  And it wasn’t until then, when I tried to pull it over a dialup connection, that I realized I’d made a horrible design mistake on the page:  instead of creating hundred-pixel thumbnails for each photo, I forced the browser to download each image entirely and then resize it into a hundred-pixel window.  I was insisting the viewer had to pull in four megs’ worth of images over a 56K connection before he could see anything on the page.  And I hadn’t realized what that did because I have a broadband connection, so my download time isn’t ineffably long and painful for four megs’ worth of image files.

Well, that just wouldn’t do at all, because anyone would lose patience waiting for all these files to load, and go look at something else instead.  (I don’t know what—pr0n or something.)  So I sat down last night and created new thumbnails for all the photos on the page, which helped the download times hugely.  It doesn’t take nearly as long to download 89K of thumbnails as it does four meg of JPG files, many of which you might not want to see in the first place.

While I was doing the overhaul, I started thinking about the page’s organization.  It hadn’t got any.  This bothered me, so I began to re-group the pictures so people in the same family lines were together, and that helped helped some.  But then I got unhappy with the captions on the photos.  Some of them were wordy, and none of them told the reader how the person in the photo was related to me, which left everyone but a few relatives completely in the dark about why any of these people mattered to me.  I grumbled at myself for not thinking the design through to begin with, rewrote all the captions, added relationship descriptions, and reworded a few I didn’t like.

So now the revised page is up.  Once I had it working, I got so excited that I put another ten pictures on the page, which added half again as much material as I had before.  Those of you who have dialup, please check the page and leave me a comment to let me know what kind of load response time you get, so I know whether I need more revision.  (Those with broadband are welcome to look as well if you’re interested, but I already know how fast the page loads over DSL, thanks.)

The nuclear submarine attends Warriors Anonymous and is reformed.  Fnord.