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I posted a topic not so long ago on how you can tidy your HTML to improve download times, and it was slated. People were saying that it's not really neccesary in this day of ISDN and cable access, and it's more effort than it's worth, when you can save your downloads more K by optimising an image. This time, I have returned with facts.
The fact is, is that 90% of users are still on diallup. Average download times are roughly 5k per second, making the average download time of a UK homepage 15 seconds. 46% of users give up on sites due to their speed of download, and 9% never come back. If it's a company site you are working on, it's more vital than ever to get your customers to stay, and having a rubbish website will lead them to thinking it's a rubbish company.
Speed. More important than ever at the moment. Yes, people are getting BB, but it's not mainstream, with an expectation of 50% of home connections by 2005. Currently it's the minority, and making sites that only they can see is really limiting your audience. Optimise all your images. Take out any image that is one colour and replace it with a bgcolor in a cell. Read my tips on HTML, and work on your code to get it faster. Pointless as it may seem, it isn't, and you can save a second off your download time from cleaning the code. Flash? can be useful, but it's too easy to be overused. If you really have to have a flash intro, at least have a "skip intro" button clearly visible. Similarly, if your site has music, have an on/off switch for it. You're more likely to wind people up if they have to wait 30 secs to get to your site, and might not stay at all. Try and keep every page under 75k. All good editing software have stream-checkers. Use them.
Hosting. Work out where your customer base is, and choose hosting accordingly. If your clients are in the states, get a stateside server, but if they are here, get one here. Sounds stupid and obvious, right? Well, when was the last time you found the real world address of a hosting company and not just looked at how much it cost? It's 1-1.5 seconds for your site to go to New York and back, and for a little research from the start, you can just take that away. For the best connections, try and get your site near the London Docklands, as that's where the UK hub is. It'll cost more, but it depends on how much you plan to earn with the site. Perhaps setting up mirrors might be an option? why not get some free space stateside and stick all your images there?
So hopefully by now you have saved a good 7-10 seconds off the download of your site. People are now trying your site more, and actually getting there. What next? You got to get them to stay. Remember when you're designing a site that however great it looks, the content is the priority, and it's better to sacrifice design over speed. Make sure people can move around your site easily, and remember the 4 click rule - the user is able to get to any page on your site from the homepage in 4 clicks. Offer the customer help whenever you can, popups attatched to moreinfo buttons will make the site more welcoming to the user. Always have your contact details available.
Hope this helps someone out there.
Slave
The fact is, is that 90% of users are still on diallup. Average download times are roughly 5k per second, making the average download time of a UK homepage 15 seconds. 46% of users give up on sites due to their speed of download, and 9% never come back. If it's a company site you are working on, it's more vital than ever to get your customers to stay, and having a rubbish website will lead them to thinking it's a rubbish company.
Speed. More important than ever at the moment. Yes, people are getting BB, but it's not mainstream, with an expectation of 50% of home connections by 2005. Currently it's the minority, and making sites that only they can see is really limiting your audience. Optimise all your images. Take out any image that is one colour and replace it with a bgcolor in a cell. Read my tips on HTML, and work on your code to get it faster. Pointless as it may seem, it isn't, and you can save a second off your download time from cleaning the code. Flash? can be useful, but it's too easy to be overused. If you really have to have a flash intro, at least have a "skip intro" button clearly visible. Similarly, if your site has music, have an on/off switch for it. You're more likely to wind people up if they have to wait 30 secs to get to your site, and might not stay at all. Try and keep every page under 75k. All good editing software have stream-checkers. Use them.
Hosting. Work out where your customer base is, and choose hosting accordingly. If your clients are in the states, get a stateside server, but if they are here, get one here. Sounds stupid and obvious, right? Well, when was the last time you found the real world address of a hosting company and not just looked at how much it cost? It's 1-1.5 seconds for your site to go to New York and back, and for a little research from the start, you can just take that away. For the best connections, try and get your site near the London Docklands, as that's where the UK hub is. It'll cost more, but it depends on how much you plan to earn with the site. Perhaps setting up mirrors might be an option? why not get some free space stateside and stick all your images there?
So hopefully by now you have saved a good 7-10 seconds off the download of your site. People are now trying your site more, and actually getting there. What next? You got to get them to stay. Remember when you're designing a site that however great it looks, the content is the priority, and it's better to sacrifice design over speed. Make sure people can move around your site easily, and remember the 4 click rule - the user is able to get to any page on your site from the homepage in 4 clicks. Offer the customer help whenever you can, popups attatched to moreinfo buttons will make the site more welcoming to the user. Always have your contact details available.
Hope this helps someone out there.
Slave
I posted a topic not so long ago on how you can tidy your HTML to improve download times, and it was slated. People were saying that it's not really neccesary in this day of ISDN and cable access, and it's more effort than it's worth, when you can save your downloads more K by optimising an image. This time, I have returned with facts.
The fact is, is that 90% of users are still on diallup. Average download times are roughly 5k per second, making the average download time of a UK homepage 15 seconds. 46% of users give up on sites due to their speed of download, and 9% never come back. If it's a company site you are working on, it's more vital than ever to get your customers to stay, and having a rubbish website will lead them to thinking it's a rubbish company.
Speed. More important than ever at the moment. Yes, people are getting BB, but it's not mainstream, with an expectation of 50% of home connections by 2005. Currently it's the minority, and making sites that only they can see is really limiting your audience. Optimise all your images. Take out any image that is one colour and replace it with a bgcolor in a cell. Read my tips on HTML, and work on your code to get it faster. Pointless as it may seem, it isn't, and you can save a second off your download time from cleaning the code. Flash? can be useful, but it's too easy to be overused. If you really have to have a flash intro, at least have a "skip intro" button clearly visible. Similarly, if your site has music, have an on/off switch for it. You're more likely to wind people up if they have to wait 30 secs to get to your site, and might not stay at all. Try and keep every page under 75k. All good editing software have stream-checkers. Use them.
Hosting. Work out where your customer base is, and choose hosting accordingly. If your clients are in the states, get a stateside server, but if they are here, get one here. Sounds stupid and obvious, right? Well, when was the last time you found the real world address of a hosting company and not just looked at how much it cost? It's 1-1.5 seconds for your site to go to New York and back, and for a little research from the start, you can just take that away. For the best connections, try and get your site near the London Docklands, as that's where the UK hub is. It'll cost more, but it depends on how much you plan to earn with the site. Perhaps setting up mirrors might be an option? why not get some free space stateside and stick all your images there?
So hopefully by now you have saved a good 7-10 seconds off the download of your site. People are now trying your site more, and actually getting there. What next? You got to get them to stay. Remember when you're designing a site that however great it looks, the content is the priority, and it's better to sacrifice design over speed. Make sure people can move around your site easily, and remember the 4 click rule - the user is able to get to any page on your site from the homepage in 4 clicks. Offer the customer help whenever you can, popups attatched to moreinfo buttons will make the site more welcoming to the user. Always have your contact details available.
Hope this helps someone out there.
Slave
The fact is, is that 90% of users are still on diallup. Average download times are roughly 5k per second, making the average download time of a UK homepage 15 seconds. 46% of users give up on sites due to their speed of download, and 9% never come back. If it's a company site you are working on, it's more vital than ever to get your customers to stay, and having a rubbish website will lead them to thinking it's a rubbish company.
Speed. More important than ever at the moment. Yes, people are getting BB, but it's not mainstream, with an expectation of 50% of home connections by 2005. Currently it's the minority, and making sites that only they can see is really limiting your audience. Optimise all your images. Take out any image that is one colour and replace it with a bgcolor in a cell. Read my tips on HTML, and work on your code to get it faster. Pointless as it may seem, it isn't, and you can save a second off your download time from cleaning the code. Flash? can be useful, but it's too easy to be overused. If you really have to have a flash intro, at least have a "skip intro" button clearly visible. Similarly, if your site has music, have an on/off switch for it. You're more likely to wind people up if they have to wait 30 secs to get to your site, and might not stay at all. Try and keep every page under 75k. All good editing software have stream-checkers. Use them.
Hosting. Work out where your customer base is, and choose hosting accordingly. If your clients are in the states, get a stateside server, but if they are here, get one here. Sounds stupid and obvious, right? Well, when was the last time you found the real world address of a hosting company and not just looked at how much it cost? It's 1-1.5 seconds for your site to go to New York and back, and for a little research from the start, you can just take that away. For the best connections, try and get your site near the London Docklands, as that's where the UK hub is. It'll cost more, but it depends on how much you plan to earn with the site. Perhaps setting up mirrors might be an option? why not get some free space stateside and stick all your images there?
So hopefully by now you have saved a good 7-10 seconds off the download of your site. People are now trying your site more, and actually getting there. What next? You got to get them to stay. Remember when you're designing a site that however great it looks, the content is the priority, and it's better to sacrifice design over speed. Make sure people can move around your site easily, and remember the 4 click rule - the user is able to get to any page on your site from the homepage in 4 clicks. Offer the customer help whenever you can, popups attatched to moreinfo buttons will make the site more welcoming to the user. Always have your contact details available.
Hope this helps someone out there.
Slave
SlaveUnit: Not wanting to upset you but I need to correct a couple of you points!!
Ah ha... Building Better Websites: Conference?
Regarding Bandwidth, your right, people have forgotten about those poor old dial up communities and have ended up alienating upto 90% of the users out there... but there were some errors in your text:
>"You're more likely to wind people up if they have to wait 30 secs to get to your site, and might not stay at all. Try and keep every page under 75k. All good editing software have stream-checkers. Use them."<
The actual figure for this is:
5 seconds on 56k (40k realisticly) is exellent, 8 seconds, good, 10 second, users attention span has gone.
Users inly have a 10 second attention span whilst using the net (evidence here from Jeffery Veen/ Jakob Nielsen and Useit.com) Unless it's information the user "really" wants, thy're gone after 10 seconds of waiting!!
>"Make sure people can move around your site easily, and remember the 4 click rule - the user is able to get to any page on your site from the homepage in 4 clicks. Offer the customer help whenever you can, popups attatched to moreinfo buttons will make the site more welcoming to the user. Always have your contact details available."<
It's actually 3 clicks (Information sourced again feom Jakob Neilsen/ Jeffery Veen and the Study of Human COmputer Interaction).
Everything should be available within 3 clicks and constant. Pop-ups are actually proven to be more distracting to a user and becoming more and more hated. help and information text is good, but has to be in context to what the user is asking for help with. Dont present the user with a massive page of HELP subjects, when they ask for help on a certain subject, they should be taken there.
I have a book you should read... I'll drop it into your office right away!!
All good stuff you mentioned, and rules people should be applying. Other things a good designer knows about is Resolution, Screen Sizes, Platform Differences, Browser behaviour and most of all, the way your average "JOE" Interacts witha computer!!
There are too many people out ther who just slap a page together, thinks "It looks good to me" and that's it... To be a good web designer/architect, you NEED to understand the technology and the history behind it not "just how to use dreamweaver and the such!!"
Fancy a fag?
Ah ha... Building Better Websites: Conference?
Regarding Bandwidth, your right, people have forgotten about those poor old dial up communities and have ended up alienating upto 90% of the users out there... but there were some errors in your text:
>"You're more likely to wind people up if they have to wait 30 secs to get to your site, and might not stay at all. Try and keep every page under 75k. All good editing software have stream-checkers. Use them."<
The actual figure for this is:
5 seconds on 56k (40k realisticly) is exellent, 8 seconds, good, 10 second, users attention span has gone.
Users inly have a 10 second attention span whilst using the net (evidence here from Jeffery Veen/ Jakob Nielsen and Useit.com) Unless it's information the user "really" wants, thy're gone after 10 seconds of waiting!!
>"Make sure people can move around your site easily, and remember the 4 click rule - the user is able to get to any page on your site from the homepage in 4 clicks. Offer the customer help whenever you can, popups attatched to moreinfo buttons will make the site more welcoming to the user. Always have your contact details available."<
It's actually 3 clicks (Information sourced again feom Jakob Neilsen/ Jeffery Veen and the Study of Human COmputer Interaction).
Everything should be available within 3 clicks and constant. Pop-ups are actually proven to be more distracting to a user and becoming more and more hated. help and information text is good, but has to be in context to what the user is asking for help with. Dont present the user with a massive page of HELP subjects, when they ask for help on a certain subject, they should be taken there.
I have a book you should read... I'll drop it into your office right away!!
All good stuff you mentioned, and rules people should be applying. Other things a good designer knows about is Resolution, Screen Sizes, Platform Differences, Browser behaviour and most of all, the way your average "JOE" Interacts witha computer!!
There are too many people out ther who just slap a page together, thinks "It looks good to me" and that's it... To be a good web designer/architect, you NEED to understand the technology and the history behind it not "just how to use dreamweaver and the such!!"
Fancy a fag?
Tyla wrote:
> SlaveUnit: Not wanting to upset you but I need to correct a couple of you
> points!!
I should have expected this when I told you about this place.... :D
> Fancy a fag?
Agh, gaw-on then.... (Behave!)
> SlaveUnit: Not wanting to upset you but I need to correct a couple of you
> points!!
I should have expected this when I told you about this place.... :D
> Fancy a fag?
Agh, gaw-on then.... (Behave!)
It's always a good idea to optimise images put optimising HTML code is usally pointless, and often shaves less than a kb off the filesize.