This page is illustrating several things.  The first thing, of course, is another style of website, very different from the last few pages you have viewed.  Pictures contain a lot of information, and take a long time to download.  (So do animated files, as we will see later)  This page illustrates a way to add pictures to a page without ending up with a page that takes forever to download.  (Remember, if it takes more than about 40 seconds or so to download, 40% to 60% of your visitors will give up and go elsewhere!)

So on this page, in stead of large photos, there are small ones, (called 'thumbnails') - you can click on the small pictures to download a full size version of the photo, which will open in a new window.  This is useful, for example, if a company wants to include a catalogue of products they sell. 

Below are pictures of my house (which is not for sale!)  Click on any picture to see a full size version of it.

This is the front of the house--and this is where you would be writing a brief description of the pictured product.
Please double click the picture.

This is the back of the house.  It is difficult to see much detail in a picture so small.  If you double-click the picture you can see a full sized version.

And this is the garden!  A picture is likely to have far more impact than just lots of words--and a big picture more effective than a small one.  Click the small picture to see what I mean!

This page is also to illustrate the disadvantage of lots of animation on the site.  Animation looks good, but animation files are very large, which makes pages that take a very long time to download.  A little animation is fine--a lot will be counter-productive.  When the British Institute of Provocative Therapy asked me to build a website to replace their rather unsatisfactory one, they had a really attractive and elegant animated version of their logo. 

Trouble was that on a web page, it made a page that took almost 2 minutes to download, on a normal dialup connection--the way the majority of people connect to the Internet.  Since the top people in the Institute all had high speed cable connections to the Internet, they were not aware of this--large pages downloaded fine for them!  By reducing the number of frames in the animation, I was able to reduce the download time using a dialup connection to around 10 to 15 seconds. 

Just to illustrate this, I have made another version of this page, with animated gold title at the top, and animated buttons at the side.  I think it looks great--but takes several minutes to open.  If you don't mind waiting for a while to see it, click the link in the text below--the animated page will take 23 times as long to open as this page did.    This page, with the associated graphics files, is about 78.2 Kilobytes.  The animated version is 1860 Kilobytes. THIS MEANS THE ANIMATED VERSION WILL TAKE AROUND 5 MINUTES TO OPEN, IF YOU HAVE A DIALUP CONNECTION so you might decide to just click the link to the next example page...