It's quite popular,
on Neocities, to collect buttons. Here are some tips, advice,
and suggestions for both creating, sharing, and collecting.
- The popular dimensions for
buttons is 88x31 pixels. Just like this:
5KB png
- You should share your buttons in
this format or other common formats only, with careful
consideration.
- Consider compression and a
suitable file format, such as gif when using a reduced
colour palette (or animation), or compressed jpg. A
png might be preferable. Consider the final file size.
4KB gif
- These considerations are
important when we appreciate that they may exist on a page with
many other buttons where loading times will be hampered.
Example:
I have a collection of 80 buttons taking up less than 1MB,
but they range in size from 1KB to 300KB
- When finding a button that you
want to use, do not "hot link" it. Hotlinking is where
you simply refer to where that file is hosted, rather than
saving it to your own domain. It is considered bad practice as
it can put a strain on the host, or cause the page that has to
load from different locations to take longer to do that.*
- Create a folder/directory at
your website for your buttons (you can call it something like
'buttons' or 'links'. I have a page called 'Friends'. Create your page so that it
refers to the images in this location.
- Create your buttons with a
helpful filename such as giving it your website's title, rather
than just calling it 'button'. If you're copying someone else's
button to use on your website, consider changing the filename to something
useful if they haven't done so.
- If you have a lot of buttons,
consider categorising them across different pages rather
than having them displayed all on one. One large page might have
trouble loading all of those buttons.
If you have any ideas or opinions
about this topic of website Buttons, then please
get in touch.
Links & Further
Information:
How-did-the-odd-size-of-88x31-become-a-standard-for-a-website-button
*There might be an
argument for hotlinking in the case of Neocities, since a
Neocities server could load the same image to each page that
requests it, but this benefit is likely assuming Neocities uses
only one server, or even one drive within that server. You can
read more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking
Another point about
hotlinking is that it's now more of an issue when the file changes
or is deleted, leaving a broken/missing image.
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