Fast Sites are Successful Sites

As more internet users subscribe to DSL and high speed cable, faster downloading sites become less of an issue. Still, any opportunity to make a site fast to download should be taken. There are still many users with dial-up connections. Can you afford to loss any percentage of possible traffic?

Speed Matters

Google.com is one of the most successful sites on the internet. One reason for this is that their site is very fast loading. Yahoo was once a more popular search engine than google when their site was simple and fast. Now they've junked up there home page so much that they have slipped way below Google in popularity as a search tool.

Design for Your Audience and Product

If you know that your audience is advanced computer users, then you can bet that they'll have high speed connections. On the other hand, if they are likely to use dial-ups, keep your pages light and fast. If your business is entertainment, then a site with Flash animation, and sounds may be very appropriate. Design for your objective and audience.

Factors Effecting Download Speed

When you call up a web page, your computer must download all of the files and graphics associated with that page. As the total amount of supporting files in a page goes up, the total "weight", or size of the page goes up. this page for example is only 28k in total. It should load fairly quickly. Good designers try to keep their pages under lean and mean.

Items That Influence the Weight of a Page (from slow loaders to fast loaders)

• Movies
• Animation
• Sound
• Photos
• Complex Graphics
• Simple Graphics
• Page Text

Page text adds almost no weight to a page, the more you can do with page text and simple graphics, the faster your site will be.

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