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Size Matters, It's True what they say!

By: Steven Gardner, Mon Dec 26th, 2005 12:17:13 PM

Yes, it really does and the smaller your webpage the better it is.

Size is an area where people can lose focus when they are concentrating on the look and branding of their website.

In print and other forms of media, size and complexity of images is not necessarily related to the viability of the advertising itself.

But in the ether of the Internet, the time for a page to load is incredibly important to the chances of it being viewed.

Soon, when Broadband is everywhere, the threshold of what is considered allowable will increase, but till that time, size will be a very important factor.

8 seconds is all you have got.

You need to grab the visitor by the horns, tell them they need what you have got and give it to them! There is no time to stuff around impressing them with your "wizzy this" and "wazzy that" If your site is there to sell something, then that is what you need to focus on.

People talk about "Content being king" and this is very true. If your content is text, then you get a lot of bang for your buck, if it is rich media like photos, video, and audio then you may need to be a little clever in the way you present this so as to not push people away purely because of the time they had to wait to see it.

On a dialup connection, 8 seconds gets you about 30 kb, that is usually enough for a few pictures and some text. If you are clever enough about it, you can make it work for you.

Here are some ideas to think about when you are looking to reduce the size of your pages.

· Use an image optimizer. It is surprising to see how many images are far larger than they need to be. This is often due to the fact that some software provide the ability to resize pictures, but do not actually change the file size or download time. The time taken to create thumbnails is well worth it in the long run.

· Choose the right format for your images. JPG and GIF are the two usual suspects for formatting images. JPG's are great for photos and places with gradients. While GIF's are ideal for cartoon style line graphics and logos.

· Use text wherever possible, while a picture may say a thousand words, if you only need ten, do it with words.

· Rollovers - those cool looking menus where they change appearance when you move your mouse over them. So, for ten menu items, you are actually loading twenty pictures...it really adds up.

· Use CSS, Cascading Style Sheets are a great tool for reducing the time to load a page. Instead of formatting each piece of text explicitly, using style sheets you can use style names instead which are much shorter and take less space.

· Don't use FrontPage...OK this might be a gross generalisation, but the number of FrontPage sites I have had to rescue and the time taken to do it shows there are much better things out there that produce much better pages.

· Check it out for yourself - use any of the good tools out there to test the speed of your page (just remember, their time are from their server to your site and not necessarily from where you are). Do a search on "web page optimization".

So with your current 8-second window, you have to get your message across. These things I have mentioned will all help in the fight against the bloated page, but you need to be vigilant to make sure that you can achieve the look you want within the time you have.

Your Audience

The audience is also vital to this calculation. Some audiences will happily wait to see the frilly bits float across the screen or the Flash intro load.

Especially in visual arts such as Museums, Art Galleries, Movies and Games, these extras are an expectation of the audience. They want you to wow them and that if you don't they will go on to the next cab off the rank.

But if your business is a little more ordinary, then time is of the essence. Consider how many other place of business there are out there like yours? Maybe not exactly the same, as yours is special, but similar enough to the web surfer where if you can't deliver what they want in the shortest time possible, they will move on.

The browsers "BACK" button is your enemy. The more people click this once they land on your site, the less effective your site is being.

One good thing to look for is the time people spend on your site. If you use AWstats (a free webstats program) it will show you the percentage of people leaving after different durations. If you have a high percentage of people leaving in the 0-30 seconds column, you may need to look at that page and see what is happening. Possibly, they just couldn't wait long enough.

While on the subject of Webstats, Google Analytics gives some great information about your visitors activities on your website. While you may not be able to sign up yet (at the time of writing, the signups had been temporarily disabled), keep an eye on it as it will be of great use to all webmasters and website owners to keep a good eye on their prized internet possession.

So keep it short and sweet, it is how you use it that matters!

About the author: Steven Gardner runs DeepWeb Web Design, a web design business that caters to all businesses looking to get an edge with their presence on the Web, providing web design, maintenance and consulting services. You can find him at www.deepweb.co.nz

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