Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, Fourth Edition

Building on Previous Design Weaknesses 31
to download the images for both the On and Off states. In Figure 2.10,
for example, the user has to download the eight images in the Off state
and the eight images in the On state, which is shown in Figure 2.11.
The entire download size of the images for the menu in Figure 2.10 is 20KB.
This is already nearly half of the goal for the entire homepage, which
is 50KB.
2. Maintenance: Creating, editing, and adding such buttons to a site is timeconsuming.
3. Dynamic functionality: The advantage of database-driven sites is their
ability to create pages on the fly. This functionality allows menus to be
created dynamically as well. When a designer creates menu items as
static images, it defeats the purpose of being able to create such items
dynamically.
Figure 2.10
Menu items saved as images in the Off state.