I won't bore you with all the technical details but I want you to look at the fundamental issues with engineering web pages. Where better to start than the top of this very page?

1) The changing page title on each page is a header for the benefit of Search Engine positioning. "Graphics as headers will not work, Search Engines cannot read graphics"

2) The page colouring. The page background has been set to white. It is not set to default, not everyone has their web browser set to white default. The colours themselves are "web safe" colours. Web safe colours are the 216 colours from the non dithered range of 256 colours that are compatible with Netscape Navigator, Mosaic and Internet Explorer. This means that these colours are rendered the same in all the browsers and they won't default to some other possibly terrible colour.

3) The page width. The width is set at under 544 pixels. This is for the benefit of Web TV viewers. There is no horizontal scroll facility on Web TV, anything over that width is simply sliced off the page.  

4) The image. The laughing mouse image is kept as small as possible to enhance page download time. It serves no purpose in functionality but it brings a little life to the page. The blocks of colour are not images, they are table cell background colours.

5) The text is set to a sans serif font. These fonts are designed for viewing on web browsers. Default fonts are generally Times New Roman or some such, they look great on paper from a type writer, but are much harder on the eyes in a browser (click here to compare legibility). The TNR page has the same point size font (10pt).These pages are set to Verdana and finally default to any of the other san-serif fonts, just in case the viewer does not have Verdana installed.

6) HTML 4.0 compliant code. all the scripting that makes up this page is compliant with the standards laid out by the "World Wide Web Consortium". These standards are set minimums that makers of web browsers use...Or at least claim to. Why not visit the link above and see how your website scores? Remember, not all faults will render a page unusable. 

7) File size. This whole page you are looking at is under 25K including graphics. It will load in under 6 seconds on a standard 56k dial up. Absolutely critical if you want to keep your viewers travelling through your web site. If you want to test your load times, a quick way is to hold down control and hit refresh on IE or try shift and reload in NN. That way it "should" not load from your browsers cache. If you really want a better idea of how long your page takes to load try Netmechanic.

8) In summary, this page can be viewed by anyone with a 9.6k modem (about 20 seconds total load time), A 256 colour monitor, a Web TV, No browser plug-ins and any default background colour setting. This page actually contains over 40 different aspects of design engineering but I have only outlined the major areas. The rest, like all forms of engineering, makes rather dull reading.

The next topic is demographic modelling and how to ensure your website will work for your viewers.

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