Presenting on the Web

Home Office Computing, Dec, 1999 by Susan Glinert

Why project your business presentation on a wall when you can post it on the Internet?

BEFORE THE WEB WAS REGARDED AS A VIABLE business tool, presentations were created with smaller audiences in mind. Presentation choices came in the form of slides, handouts, or an automated slide show that could be stored on a floppy disk. Now, however, you can upload your presentation to a Web site and let viewers watch at their leisure. So why limit a presentation to the number of folks that can fit in a conference room? Develop a training program or sales pitch that may appeal to thousands or even millions.

Microsoft PowerPoint lets you create simple but workable Web sites suitable for sharing information. Share your presentation with a widely scattered audience; distribute it via the Internet and invite all.

STEP 1 Get Ready to Create a Web-worthy Presentation

PowerPoint includes templates specifically tailored for Web pages. These designs use a landscape-format (horizontal) page sized to 10 by 7.5 inches, with a default screen resolution of 800 by 600 pixels.

Unless there's a compelling reason to do so, you should leave these defaults alone, as they're designed to look good on most monitors. You can start from scratch with one of PowerPoint's Web page templates, or you can apply a Web template to a previously created presentation (see Figure 1). Either way, you should keep in mind these four steps.

STEP 2 Remember the Rules of Web Design

We cannot overstate the importance of keeping graphics as small as possible. Keep in mind that plenty of Web surfers are still using 28.8Kbps modems, and the larger an image, the longer it'll take to appear. Folks browsing the Web are notoriously flighty--if you make them wait too long, they'll skip your show altogether. If your presentation is packed with graphics, invest in a Web-smart image editor such as Ulead Systems' PhotoImpact 5 ($80; 800-85-ULEAD, www.ulead.com), which can squeeze images into compact files without sacrificing their appearance.

If you double-click on an object in PowerPoint and display the Web tab, you can specify the alternate text that appears while the graphic is loading or if it's missing. It's a good idea to add this information (see Figure 2), as some users turn off graphics in their browsers, and others like to move ahead to the next page without waiting for every image to download.

Design your pages using universally available fonts such as Times Roman and Arial--your headlines may took more compelling in Futura or Goudy, but the person browsing your show likely won't have those fonts installed. If you simply must display your headlines in a particular typeface, create them in an image editor such as PhotoImpact or Adobe Photoshop and then save them in GIF format (the best choice for nonphotographic bitmaps). Be aware that text smaller than 16-point type may look pixelated when displayed as a picture.

Presentations look their best when played on a screen with the same resolution as the computer used to create them, but you have no way of knowing what display a user has. You can set the resolution of the target monitor to a fixed size by clicking the Web Options button in the General tab of PowerPoint's Options dialog box; as with the program's templates, we recommend 800 by 600 resolution as the best compromise (see Figure 3).

Alternately, you can check the "Resize graphics to fit browser window" check box in the General tab of the Web Options dialog box. When enabled, this option automatically scales the page size to fill the screen, regardless of the resolution, but may distort some images on certain monitors.

Remember that some people may not have the latest extras in computer hardware, so make sure your message comes across via text alone. PNG-format images and videoclips may be cutting-edge, but the audience members' machines may not support these features or may run them so slowly that they become irritants rather than enhancements.

STEP 3 Publish to the Web

Publishing a presentation to the Web means placing a copy of your show on a Web server in HTML format. PowerPoint does the translation for you and makes it easy to put your files anywhere you wish--on a local or remote server.

It's important that all resources for your presentation be available on the playback computer. If you've stored pictures in one directory folder and sound clips in another, for instance, you have to ensure that the playback computer has the identical directory structure.

You need to ask your Web host, Internet service provider (ISP), or company intranet administrator how pages and ancillary files should be structured on the remote computer--whether you should, for example, create subfolders for graphics and multimedia or store all the files in a single folder. Also, if you've created clickable image maps, you should ask if there are any limitations, since these may require additional support from the server machine.

Before you upload your presentation, you should view it from within a browser by selecting File/Web Page Preview (see Figure 4). If everything looks good, choose File/Save as Web Page to have PowerPoint write the files in HTML format to a location you specify, such as your hard disk, a company Web server, or a file transfer protocol (FTP) site.