New Parks Website

By: Mr. Wilson on May 21, 2009
3 comments
A new Lincoln Parks and Recreation website went live this morning. I haven't yet had a chance to explore it in depth, but on visual impact alone it is oodles better than the Lincoln City Libraries site that Nirak panned a while back. I do have a quick nit to pick. (This is the web developer in me talking.) The background gradients? They're all wrong on multiple levels:
  1. The gradients are blocky, in large part because they have been exported as GIFs. PNG or JPG should be used instead.
  2. There are two background gradients. One covers the entire page, while the other backs just the main content area. I can't tell if the two gradients don't match on purpose, or if that's an accident. If it's an accident, make them match.
  3. The two background images are way too huge in filesize terms (roughly 100KB total for the pair). The page background image is over 49KB. Export it as a 1 x 1000 pixel JPG and poof, you shave off 99% of the file size (down to 474 bytes in my test). Likewise the other image's filesize can be substantially decreased, though by how much depends on a few different factors. Regardless, you could easily shave off at least 30KB -- and perhaps as much as 50KB -- out of the image's 54KB.
But again, I'm being picky. I'm sure I could find lots of other things to be picky about, too. A large part of my job involves being picky about these sorts of things, so they jump out at me. Overall the site is a nice, clean new look for Parks and Rec. Looks good, folks.

Comments

See what your friends and neighbors have to say about this.

Gene
May 21, 2009 at 4:38PM

Looks like they’ve added some pdf information as well. It’s not perfect, but a nice improvement.

Swid
May 21, 2009 at 5:08PM

Shame on you for even suggesting that JPG is a suitable format for non-photographic images. Just PNG or SVG, please. 😉 (And now *I’ll* duck for implying that SVG is a viable Web image format.)

Mr. Wilson
May 21, 2009 at 5:21PM

To be honest, I started out suggesting PNG for that image, but I shaved another 400ish bytes off the filesize by going with JPEG. That 400 bytes could mean the difference between ... uhh, well, actually it’s pretty inconsequential. Still, JPEG is great for situations where you have smooth variations in color. Gradients typically display very well as JPEGs.

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