Sunday, May 19, was our 6th anniversary. We started the day out by opening our gifts to each other. Terry gave me a wonderful cross stitch of an aging Mr. and Mrs. Teddy Bear and I gave her one of those new Timex Indiglo watches she has had her eye on. (Those are the coolest things!) Terry and I fixed our favorite breakfast of pancakes, sausage and bacon. Pancakes are good when fixed at home, but there is something about them when they are fixed outdoors while you're camping. Yummy, they were wonderful! We then headed over to the nondenominational church service. It was very inspiring considering the setting right on the lake among all of the tall pine trees. You couldn't have asked for a more perfect setting.

After the service, we spent a couple of hours paddle-boating and swimming at the lake. It is amazing to watch all of the kids and the limitless amount of energy they have. Did we really have that much energy when we were kids? In the evening, we headed into Tyler to our favorite Mexican food restaurant and ended the evening seeing "Twister." What an enjoyable day we were able to spend together! Monday morning we broke camp early and headed to the outlet mall for some shopping. It's always good to get away, but the best part is returning home.

We hope everyone had a safe and happy Memorial Day holiday. Terry and I spent the day with family celebrating my nephew's graduation from Martin High School. Jason is quite a kid and he deserves all of the honors and scholarships that have been bestowed on him. We started the day out with a brunch over at my brother-in-law and sister's home and ended the day at the graduation exercise.

1. Keep Your Design Flexible

With print media everyone sees your work in the same context, not so with the Web. How your page appears to a viewer depends upon which browser he or she is using. Many of Netscape's advanced features don't translate well to other browsers. So the beautiful banner you designed with the full color photographs embedded with in it may or may not translate well from viewer to viewer. I have four different browsers on my system and I try to view my work in each of the browsers before I upload a page. I use a lot of Netscape specific code because I know the majority of my readers are StarText subscribers who use Netscape. When I start getting more mail from readers outside the StarText family, I'll have to consider making my column more browser friendly.

2. Leave Room

Keep in mind that the average web browser is running on a 13-15 inch monitor that has a screen size of 640 x 480 pixels. After the browser is loaded, you'll probably end up with a useable area of 500 x 400 pixels. Make sure that any banner, picture, logo or graphic fits within that area. If not, more of your viewers will have to scroll vertically or horizontally to fully access your page.

Within the print media, we use pictures to grab the reader's attention. On Web pages pictures are used to convey information or to have a reader linger and return often. If you've found a really neat picture, just don't put it on the page because you think it is neat. Make sure the picture has a purpose on the page.

When dealing with the print media, you can have a large picture on a page. It doesn't take any extra time for a reader to access it since it is already printed on the page. Dealing with Web pages, large graphics should be carefully thought out. Remember, large graphics require a long time to load. Everyone now a-days wants everything quick. Someone accessing your page may wait the first time for a graphic to download, but they will be reluctant to return. If you have several pictures on a page, the download times will multiply. That is one of the problems that I discovered accessing our newly written home page over at my nephews. It just took too long for all of the graphics to come down the "pipeline." If you have several pictures, break up the pages to have just a few pictures on each page, not a whole bunch on one page. The page will load much quicker and you'll have happier viewers. One last word of wisdom, generally try to keep your graphics under 50K.

4. GIF Versus JPEG or JPG

At this point in time on the Net, the two graphic formats used by browsers are GIF and JPEG or JPG. GIF files are limited to 256 colors while JPEG can support true 24 bit color which can range in the millions of colors. GIF's are usually used for logos and in line graphics while JPEG's are normally used for pictures and photographs. JPEG's are usually larger in size than GIF's but JPEG offers built in compression up to 100:1. You say great, but with the compression comes a loss of image quality. On the Net, the preferred standard is a ratio of 10:1. Using that ratio, the loss of quality is unnoticeable. Lastly, JPEG is not supported by all browsers so there may be around 20% of your viewers that won't be able to see the stunning pictures that you've included within your page.

5. Interlace Your Graphics

Way back when the GIF format was designed, it was given the designation of type 87a. To view the graphic, a viewer had a wait until the whole image was loaded before it was displayed. Later a new type of GIF was developed, the Interlaced 89a. It was developed to show the picture as it arrived. As the image is being download, every 4th line is sent, starting at the top. So basically the image is sent in 1/4's. When the first 1/4 has arrived, the viewer has a rough idea of what the image is going to look like and they can make a decision whether or not to wait for the whole image to load. Using an Interlaced 89a is better because the viewer doesn't have to sit and look at a blank screen wondering what is happening. With the Interlacing, you keep the viewer's attention focused on you page where you want him to be.

6. Keep Your Pages Less Than 100K

One very important point to remember, which was made very apparent to me on Memorial Day, is that there are still many 14.4 modems in use to access the Net. Taking that into consideration, the total size of your finished page is very important to those individuals accessing the Net at the slower speeds. It doesn't matter how stunning your pictures are, no one wants to sit and wait for a huge graphic or picture to download. If you page takes too long, a first time visitor may just terminate the download and leave, never to return. That's what you don't want. Try to limit your larger graphics to the 15-25K range and the smaller ones in the 2K-5K range.

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups ask that a blue ribbon be worn or displayed to show your support for the essential human right of free speech. This fundamental building block of free society, affirmed by the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1791, and by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, hs been sacrificed in the 1996 Telecom Bill." For more information about this "Blue Ribbon Campaign" that is very important to us all, visit:

http://www.eff.org/BlueRibbon/sites.html