Novice question..

P

PaHick

Gawd
Joined
Jul 2, 2005
Messages
785
First, I dont know squat about websites. Second just looking for pointers for my friend. He has a website he is building himself(novice also). From what hes telling me, hes is selling products on ebay, and this site is to show some offerings. He has pdf files which contain the product lists. He was thinking about linking them on his site, but I said that was a bad idea because of 56k'ers and such. So he thought about converting to pdf to html, but is having trouble in that the conversion totally messes up(text not right, jpegs not right).

So I guess the question is, does he link the pdf's to the site? Or is there a better format to convert from pdf to ? that would make it easier on his customers? Ill relay any tips you all give. Appreciate it!
 
Why would you worry about dialup? You really think he'd get any dialup users? Leave the documents as PDFs and link to them with off product pages. The product page will have a picture or two and a short summary of the product, then a link to the PDF for download.
 
You could just download a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor and then fix whatever is wrong in the HTML document. However, these editors often don't comply to web standards... but for an ebay site, it's not going to matter much.

Your other option is to write the code, which is a way more involved, but HTML is an easy "language" to grasp. I would highly recommend http://www.w3schools.com above many other tutorial sites on the 'net.

If bandwidth is an issue and you don't like either of those options, just optimize the PDF with acrobat pro or foxit pdf editor. All it does is compress everything in the document, but it's the easiest route.

Lastly, I agree with the above poster. A dial-up user is going to have issues with pretty much every website on the internet these days, so I wouldn't be too concerned about bandwidth.
 
Last edited:
voodoochildbc said:
Lastly, I agree with the above poster. A dial-up user is going to have issues with pretty much every website on the internet these days, so I wouldn't be too concerned about bandwidth.
Click to expand...

Be careful here. Many novice "developers/designers" understand very little about what is/isn't acceptable from a bandwidth perspective. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone upload an 8Mb graphic right out of their DSLR for use as a head shot on a staff page. Just because you resize it in your WYSIWYG editor doesn't mean that image has been resized; even if you're only displaying it 180px tall, your users are still pulling that full 8Mb image down the pipe.

Being dial-up "compatible" isn't as critical these days, but any designer or developer worth their weight will tell you that being efficient and bandwidth conscious is still critical to any successful project. It's more efficient for your users, and it'll save bandwidth on your host (any potentially save you money depending on your hosting plan).
 
^ Oh I totally agree. An 8 MB image is not acceptable in many cases. I was thinking more along the lines of compressing a .jpg until it's to the point of terrible quality.
 
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