Image is everything | Web Directions

Image is everything

• In: Blog
• By: john
• April 7th, 2008

One serious drawback of moving house in Australia is you’ll typically wait no small time to get your internet connection moved. For the last three weeks, I’ve been in this situation, and as connection is not an option, I’ve needed and alternative until someone could be bothered providing me with a service which frankly should be close to essential as water or electricity these days no?

So, I opted for a 3G USB modem for my laptop.

Living as I do at the edge of the network, it’s been slow - like dialup slow - which has necessitated all kinds of tricks like turning off images when browsing to load pages in an even remotely acceptable time frame.

Which makes for an interesting user experience.

Most sites are close to unusable in this state, in my experience of the last three weeks. Time and again I’ve found myself turning images back on, reloading a page, then turning them off again in order to find a basic button or instruction. Some of the big names who you’d expect to do better, like Basecamp, and Wordpress (2.3 login) are guilty of this. But most sites have sizable chunks of their navigation, and user interface disabled once images are.

To tell the truth, in 2008, it’s a shock and a disappointment to find so many sites relying on images for their user experience. Even basic things like alternate text is missing on images that are blocks of text at site after site.

I’m happy to say our sites (westciv and web directions) fair reasonably well.

So, how do your sites do?

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