Designing
for WebTV
Web TV is a new animal for web masters, it's presentation is on the TV screen
instead of the computer screen which means less resolution and an interlaced
display with a larger dot-mask. You should consider configuring your server
to detect browser types and have a completely different set of pages for
Web TV viewers. These pages must be oriented to the habits of the couch potato
who will be sitting 10 feet away from the screen with a remote control instead
of a mouse and keyboard. Although he may have a wireless keyboard somewhere
he's reluctant to get up and find it much less typing on it so keep fill-out
forms to the minimum -- use radio buttons instead if possible.
Some Guidelines
for Designing for WebTV
Here are some guidelines you can use for Web TV essentials of design:
-
Design pages for the small screen-- Web TV uses a screen size of 560x378.
-
Pages should be kept to one screen -- couch potatoes aren't familiar with
the concept of scrolling.
-
Keep your page vertical -- Web TV doesn't have a horizontal scroll.
-
Reduce the number of objects on the screen to the minimum -- couch potatoes
are not used to a lot of information on the screen and get confused if there's
too much too look at.
-
Forget image maps -- there's no mouse to accurately position the cursor.
-
Avoid using frames - Web TV doesn't currently support them and there's not
enough screen space to effectively use them. (try using the Web TV tag "SIDEBAR"
for a fixed menu tag instead)
-
Keep your images to less than 544 pixels wide -- Web TV will automatically
scale larger images but the result may ruin your presentation.
-
Don't use White (or red) backgrounds - remember the TV will "bloom" on a
large saturated red or white area on the screen.
-
Do use a dark background with light text - remember it's TV folks!
-
Horizontal elements need to be at least 2 pixels thick - the TV screen is
interlaced so only half of the horizontal lines are painted on the screen
at one time.
Next we'll learn about Site Promotion &
Marketing
|
![[ Web Graphics ]](../images/docsleft.gif){kind=small}
![[ Site Promotion ]](../images/docsrigh.gif){kind=small}
![[ Top of Page ]](../images/docscont.gif){kind=small}
![[ Table of Contents ]](../images/dirbtn.gif){kind=small}
