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The NEED For SPEED by Hugh Brecher, M.A., Executive Director Association Of Ethical Internet Professionals
I can't stand driving behind slowpokes on the Interstate! I just switch lanes and leave
them in the dust just as soon as I can. Luckily we can "change lanes" on the web with
nothing more than a mouse click and leave the slowpoke websites wondering why so few
of their hits aren't being converted into sales. I wish I had a "web horn" that I could blow
at the slowpokes to get them to speed up. | Net surfers like you and me are in a hurry to find what we want and have little patience with those websites that are just crawling along. I don't understand why it isn't obvious to website owners and developers that the downloading speed of their pages is directly related to the size of their bank deposits? Fast loading pages are not glamorous, pretty, "hot", "cool", exciting or colorful. They're just really good for business. "Cutesy Pie" stuff is hurting business: It was noted that available modem speeds are rising and that respondents are upgrading frequently (48% in the last year), BUT web pages are getting more heavily laden with things that make them take longer to download: images, animations, scripts, etc.) All these "cutesy pie" gimmicks, pretty pictures, overly long tables, jumbo sized web pages are having the OPPOSITE effect that website owners really want. We want the visitors to hit and browse and, hopefully do business with us. The "cutesy pie" stuff is causing them to HIT and RUN. (GVU's 9th WWW Survey of April 1998) More than HALF of all respondents reported that they had left a web site while searching for product information just because the site was TOO SLOW! The next most frequent problem, one that is GETTING WORSE on the web, is that of broken links. There are inexpensive shareware programs that virtually automate the solution of this problem. Although there are easily available solutions to this problem, few sites are making any use of them. It should be noted that the available solutions apply to static but not dynamic HTML pages. Surfers often have a hard time finding what they want on your page; the "good stuff" is often deeply buried. Slow web servers are a serious problem for many domains. How fast is the server that is hosting YOUR site? How does your website look when viewed with recent versions of AOL software? Although the AOL browser is MSIE based, it is NOT standard and does NOT render pages exactly the same as Netscape and non-AOL versions of MSIE. SOLUTIONS REVISITED: Some of us already know what the solutions are, but let's itemize them again: Small pages. Many of us can break one large page into 3 smaller ones and just link the 2nd and 3rd from the first one. Put your best and most important stuff on the first page. Reduce the number of graphics and compress the byte size of those that remain. Repeating use of the same graphic on the same website is GOOD. It takes advantage of browser caching and doesn't require additional loading time. For Netscape use the low resolution option for your graphics. You may also consider interlaced GIF images or progressive JPEG files. This way visitors will at least see a low-res version of the images you need while the high resolution images are still loading. If necessary, move your domain to A FAST Web Server. Need tables? Break them into smaller sections. Browsers typically wait for a table to be complete before it is displayed. Smaller tables will be visible more quickly and will entertain your visitor while the others are still loading. Broken links and graphics? Why? They're EASY to track and fix on static HTML web pages. Visitors appreciate excellence. Broken web functions do not make good impressions on visitors. Get a copy of a link verifier and use it. (Members of AEIP are provided access to free downloads of a fine shareware link verifier.) Hiring an outside company to verify your links can cost $150 /year, or more, and often won't do as good a job as you can do for yourself. Really effective link verifiers do not yet seem to be available for dynamic HTML pages. Make it VERY easy for a visitor to quickly find what they want. The analogy here is that of supermarkets putting the milk in the back of the stores so shoppers must pass a lot of other merchandise and may make additional purchases. A web page is not a supermarket. If visitors can't easily find what they want they'll just click away to a "friendlier" web page. Put the good stuff where it's EASY to find. See how your pages look using recent versions of AOL, MSIE, and Netscape also. Optimize your pages so that they look well at the most common screen resolutions of 640 x 480 and 800 x 600. Remember there are lots of "low-tech" folks with OLD monitors who can't see your pages the way you really want, and many of them are your potential customers. (Posted 10/1999)
Written by: Hugh Brecher, M.A., Executive Director AEIP, Florida, FL USA |
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