Overview |
One of the primary reasons in designing this web site
is to make the United Way GIS project accessible to the public. Due
to the project's innovative nature and potential for replication,
a professional looking web site is essential. Therefore, much time
was spent in designing the site and learning new web authoring techniques.
Specifically, the following three items were the areas of greatest concentration:
-
Use of frames - The split
screen of this site is the result of using frames. Frames allow for
a table of contents with embedded links along the left side of this site
with the actual content appearing on the right.
-
Image optimization -
While most GIS systems can export maps into a web-ready format (e.g. JPEG,
GIF), the image file size is often large and potentially cumbersome for
web viewing, i.e. the images take too long to load. Optimizing the
images seeks to find a balance between the quality of the image and the
file size.
-
Content design - The
ultimate purpose of this web site is for public viewing. Because
the subject matter involves the United Way and community development issues,
it was desired to have a self-contained site that provides a story-book
like presentation that can be followed by anyone regardless of their knowledge
of GIS.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Use of Frames |
This site was designed using Netscape Composer 4.03 which
does not allow the developer to make frames. Therefore, it was necessary
to write HTML manually. While frustrating at first, frames are not
that difficult to create. For a model, go back to the home page and
view the source code of that page using your web browser. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Image Optimizing |
The table below summarizes the file size and time savings
obtained by optimizing the images. There are 15.0 seconds of time
savings for the "Both" page of spatial auto-correlation!
File Name
|
Original Size
|
Optimized Size
|
Web Loading
Time Savings
(final load-up time)
|
County-wide Poor |
42K
|
16K
|
8 seconds (4.9)
|
Grand Rapids Poor |
62K
|
26K
|
11 seconds (8.0)
|
County-wide Race |
37K
|
14K
|
7.3 seconds (4.3)
|
Grand Rapids Race |
53K
|
22K
|
9.6 seconds (7.0)
|
Map of Michigan |
17K
|
14K
|
0.9 seconds (4.4)
|
Grand Rapids Outline |
35K
|
16K
|
6.0 seconds (5.1)
|
Faster page loading is an obvious
benefit of the optimization process. However, image quality has been
slightly sacrificed. The edges of the maps are slightly fuzzy due
to this process and may not be the optimal images for printing. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|