A wise man once said, ?The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.? In commercial web development nothing could be more true or more profitable might be a better way to put it.
In case you didn?t know, the majority of internet surfers in the United States are connecting to the internet with a dial-up modem still. When I was told that a year ago I couldn?t believe it. Ever since I got my broadband connection hooked up my entire world changed. I could actually download a song in less then 6 business days, and actually try out a demo for a ?real? computer game. Not to mention being able to actually view streaming video in real-time and not having it compressed into nothingness. From that point on I haven?t looked back.
That was until the traffic to my websites started to decline gradually over the course of a month or two. What was happening was that the content I was putting on my web pages was just too much for the regular dial-up connection to handle. People will wait only so long (and believe me, it isn?t long) before they will click the back button and go to a site that will load faster. My pages were coming in at 150 and 200k sizes. That was way too much, the standard rule for page size has been debated, but from what I have gathered from my research I would say about 60k. Anymore than that and you risk losing your surfer to your competitor.
Want a great example of a user friendly, fast website? Just visit www.google.com and you will see what I mean. Look at how fast that page loads. Sometimes the best is the least.
So what about that cool Flash intro, or that awesome background music that you put on your site? Does that have to go? Well, for the most part yes, but not entirely. You can always put a choice on your home page that asks people to click which version of your site they would like to view, high or low bandwidth. My advice is to lose the bells and whistles that take up a lot of space. Believe it or not most people, when they come to a Flash intro on a site, they will just click the ?skip intro? link. That is, if you have a ?skip intro? link. If you don?t then you will never see that surfer again, trust me.
There are plenty of things that you can add to a web page that don?t take up 90k of space. Certain JavaScript interactive effects can work wonders to a static page as well as DHTML and other languages. Do yourself a favor, take a tutorial or two on these things, take the time out to better your customer?s experience or you won?t have any customers to worry about.
Webmasters will tell you that a great text link can beat a $200 Flash Banner any day. Put yourself in your customer?s shoes. If you connect to the net through a broadband connection then be sure to view your site with a dial-up connection for quality control. Also, make sure that you view your site in different browsers as well. The most important are Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla and Opera. If it looks good in all of those then you are pretty much ok.
Remember, what you think is cool and worth the wait for a download, other people might hate. If you want to build a site for the masses then sacrifices are going to have to be made, it is up to you to intelligently choose which ones they will be.
Be sure to visit my new weblog at http://designfordummies.blogspot.com for my latest tips on Web Design for the weekend warriors out there.
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