How much would you complain..

[invertedpanda]

about a site that is purely graphical content?

I'm doing the new Social Engine website, and I'm designing every page to look like pages in a war propaganda pamphlet that has seen a little abuse. Each page will be designed in photoshop, printed, and then re-scanned after abusing each page, in order to give it as much authenticity as I can. The page will only be updated once every couple of months.

I will be providing a text only alternative, of course (I can't leave my fellow Lynx users behind :)), but it won't have any fancy stuff at all - just black text on white background.

Bandwidth consumption isn't really a huge issue.. I have 60gb of bandwidth per month, and while I do host other sites, they don't take that much bandwidth.

Obvious issues would be scaling; People using high resolutions on smaller screens will have issues reading it. I may fix that by having a higher-res version.

Any other issues associated with this type of design? The main focus is aesthetics, however I don't want to sacrifice accessability in that, so thats why I am providing the text only alternative. I'm NOT doing this in Flash - that would make the site hard to view on lower end systems (I hate viewing flash sites on my 300mhz laptop).

[NogDog]

Search engine ranking will be extremely hurt if the page is 100% graphical. (There will be no actual text content for the search engines to analyze and rank.)

Obviously text-to-speech software won't find anything to convert, though this would be offset to some degree if your text-only alternative is easily found and linked to on every graphical page.

Personally, I think you'd serve the users better by creating a background image with the desired look, and perhaps a few graphical headings (with ALT text!!!) that extend the theme, then presenting the rest of the actual content in text; thus allowing the user to resize the fonts as needed as well as addressing all the other problems. (Many of the examples at www.zengarden.com come to mind, such as http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=165/165.css or http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=162/162.css )

[invertedpanda]

Yeah, normally I would make as much of my site actual text as possible, but this time the text has to fit perfectly in each section (any difference and it just isn't going to look right.. Plus, with text instead of an image, it loses it's authentic look).

The way it'll work is I'll have a link to the text only section on each page (it'll be located at the bottom of the page, but code wise it'll be at the top of the .html file so readers can grab it easier without sifting through all the images), as well as a splash page with a direct link to the text only page.

The text only will be spidered by search engines, so I'm not worried about that. I'll also place a link at the top to get back to the graphical versions of the site.

[NogDog]

As long as you're willing to go the extra mile to provide two separatesets of content (graphical and text) with crosslinks between them, I personally don't have a problem with it. If it were for an e-commerce site where I wanted to avoid all potential barriers to the revenue stream I might be more concerned (plus I wouldn't want to pay for the upkeep of parallel content). But again, if you're willing to go the effort of covering both options, have fun (and give us a link to the result when it's up and running :) ).

[invertedpanda]

Heh, yeah. Social Engine, my solo industrial music project, is a huge labor of love. While I don't write as much industrial music anymore (I write more classical stuff nowadays), I still work pretty hard when it comes to advertising and sharing my music. I do a new website every few months it seems :) I think I've done more websites for Social Engine than contracted, paid website designs.

[buntine]

Because of the context of the Web Site, I don't feel it has a huge responsibility to conform to the general rules-of-thumb. Its an artistic expression (as is the music), so go nuts with it.

Regards.

[invertedpanda]

Here is the layout of the home page (minus the links to text only versions and whatnot - no links are in place), to give you an idea of what I'm doing..

http://sound.the-engine.org/se/concept/index2.html (may take a bit to load).

Fun part was tearing up the paper. I designed it in photoshop, printed it (300dpi), folded it, took a screwdriver to the folds, tore a few small bits, and then crumpled and uncrumpled. Destruction is fun!