Web Site Design Tips - Speed Of Loading

This article in our series on web site design tips is going to focus on one of the biggest mistakes that web designers make, even the good ones. I'm referring to the matter of how quickly their web site loads. I'm going to share some do's and don'ts and some tips for getting your web site to load faster so that you don't lose your visitors before they even get to see your page. Hopefully, you will find these tips useful.

The biggest mistake that web designers make, even the ones that really know their stuff, is that they assume that everybody is on a high speed Internet connection. It might surprise you to learn that only a very small percentage of the Internet population is on high speed. A good portion of the community is still on dial up. I know this for a fact because some of the products I sell are fairly large and I get many emails from people telling me that they can't download them because they are on dial up. So don't assume, because that's where you get into a lot of trouble.

What does this mean when it comes to fancy web site design? Well, for starters, it means kill the multi megabyte Flash presentations, especially on your welcome or main page. If a Flash movie is loading and the visitor is simply staring at a blank screen for five minutes, if they even wait that long, they are just going to pick themselves up and go elsewhere. If you feel that you must have a Flash presentation on your main page, then make sure you have a link in it that says something like "Skip This Intro" so that people with slow Internet connections can bypass it.

The next thing that you want to concentrate on when it comes to speed of loading is your graphics. Yes, I know. You want your web site to look cool so that people have something to look at that isn't just plain text. However, there are ways to include graphics on your pages that won't bog down the loading process. Here are a few tips for doing so.

The first thing to do is NOT have too many images loading on one page. The more images that have to load, the slower the loading process. If you have a site that is displaying posters, and you want to display a large number of posters, break them up into separate pages. Let's say you have 100 posters that you want to display. By breaking them up into pages of 10 each with a link pointing to the next page, you'll have pages that load faster and a nice navigation besides.

The next thing you want to do is keep your image sizes small. The larger the image, the longer it is going to take for it to load. If the original size of those 100 posters is 800 x 600, you might want to first represent each one as a thumbnail of maybe 80 x 60 and then have visitors click on the thumbnail to view the larger image. This will greatly speed up load time.

By following these simple tips on Flash movies and images, you'll improve the load time of your site and you'll keep your visitors there a lot longer.

To YOUR Success