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What connection speed are your surfers viewing your site at?

A telecommunications company recently conducted a poll across the continental United States to see what percentages of each type of internet Connection people were using. The results might surprise some of you. The winner by a wide margin was, that’s right you guessed it, good ol’ dial-up! According to recorded statistics at the end of 2005, 54% of the nation is still connecting to the web with an old fashioned telephone line. Coming in second was cable modem with 29% and the other 17% were a mix of ISDN, DSL, and other assorted broadband connections.

I have known about this situation long before I heard those statistics, the reason I found out was because I was gearing all of my websites towards users with broadband connections, assuming that most people surfing the web were doing so at high speed. This couldn’t be any further from the truth.

If you are designing a website with loads of Flash, high quality 200k images, streaming video. background music, and huge graphic files then you are immediately alienating more than half of your customer base before you even upload your site to the web. I don’t have an MBA in Business but common sense should tell you that is not a good decision.

Before even designing a single page of your site you need to sit down and draw up a plan, it doesn’t have to be a plan that is so complex that even you can’t follow it, but it does have to have a few simple things, common sense things. The first of which is a target audience, who are they? If you are selling consumer electronics over the internet then your target audience is probably male/female between the ages of 17 and 24 arguably. Not too young to own a credit card and not old enough (for the most part) to be married and not being able to use that credit card. Now if you were selling adult diapers over the internet then I doubt that the same target audience would bring you much success, obviously. Now that you have your target audience clearly known, all of your other decisions down the line can be based on this information. You know what they say, knowledge is power.

What region you are targeting can play a big factor as well, the fact is that most of the broadband connectivity in the U.S. is on either the east or west coast, the majority of the dial-up is in the Midwestern United States. So if you were building a website that was going to be selling NASCAR Apparel then your target audience would generally be in the mid-western and some southern states. Being that these states are pretty much all dial-up then you would design your site accordingly. To do that you would be best off using only HTML text, you should never use a graphic file for text on a site where you are trying to design for speed (and let’s face it, you are always designing for speed, just more so in this case) and even when you are not unless you absolutely must, stick with HTML text. The very first thing to load on a web page is HTML text, so keep that in mind.

There is always some debate about the maximum size a web page should be when you are designing for lows speed connections. Some say 65k, some say 90k, and some even say 35k. Well, as far as I am concerned 65k is about right, and even that is a pretty thin web page. You have to do some really good layout and planning work and make every byte count towards the design or else you will find yourself with a very boring, very static web page. This is where JavaScript and DHTML come in, using a little of each can liven up a web page dramatically and improve the overall look. A lot of prewritten scripts can be found at no charge on the web (usually, you just have to keep the copyright info in the comment tags) and these scripts don’t require much knowledge of the language they are written in. Usually all you have to do is customize a few lines so the script fits your specific needs and just copy and paste. After a few times doing this you will get the hang of it and you will start to wonder what else can be done with scripts. All I must tell you is not to get script trigger happy and start loading up your pages with a million lines of code, nothing will lose a surfer faster than a slow load time, trust me.

So there is some food for thought for you, maybe I touched on a topic that you let totally escape you for the time being and now that you have been notified you can design your pages with connection speed in mind.




This post first appeared on Web Design For Dummies, please read the originial post: here

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What connection speed are your surfers viewing your site at?

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