Website Design Tips

Why this is Important

Many netsurfers have short attention spans and don't like waiting even 15 seconds for a page to load. So your hit count will increase if you keep the load time on your pages under 30 seconds on a 28.8K modem. Most definitely keep it under two minutes, or you will lose a lot of visitors. Yes, lots of people use 56K modems now, but the phone lines in many areas keep actual access speed limited to less than 28.8K even.

How to Fix It

NetMechanic and WebsiteGarage can tell you exactly how long a page loads at various modem speeds, and they each have a free utility that reduces the file size of images [by decreasing the color depth, at some cost in the quality of the picture]. NetMechanic is best if you want your entire site checked, but if it's just one page WebsiteGarage is faster.

Please keep in mind that copyrighted graphics are just that and must have the copyrighted artist/owner’s permission before you may alter them in any way (this can be accomplished by an email to the artist/owner from their website in most cases).

In most cases, slow load time is caused primarily by graphics. Animated graphics are the worst culprits. Autoloading sound files will also cause trouble with load time [WebsiteGarage doesn't include that time in its Load Time report, but NetMechanic does].

If your awards or rings page for example is too stuffed, try breaking it into two or more smaller pages. Also, you can get your images to load a bit faster by using the dimensions in the image tag. For example:

Images that are on your own website will generally load about 2 seconds faster than those off-site. See also Images.

Tables also will load faster if their size is given, although width is usually better given in percentage so that you are SURE it will fit on everybody's screen or frame, no matter what the resolution is. For more information see the HTML Goodies Tutorial on Tables.

You can also get help from Dr. HTML.

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