Life in the Slow Lane

Like most web developers, I do most of my work on what would have been an obscene amount of bandwidth back in the bad-old-days.

A recent connectivity failure, however, made me re-learn some old lessons and home truths that many of us have forgotten, and that are costing us money every single day. After 18 months of nearly trouble-free service, my cable modem died late last week. Naturally, that meant several days before a technician would arrive to repair it. In the meantime, I dug a conventional modem out of my old travel kit, and got to re-learn the joys of dialup.

Back in the mid 90′s, I paid a lot of attention to things like graphic size and page load speed. I never really forgot that, but after spending a lot of time away from dialup, I got lazy, and my pages bloated up. Apparently, so did everyone else’s.

For most sites, a quick check of your logs will reveal that the majority of your visitors come from AOL, MSN, and Earthlink. The majority of these people are using dial-up modems, and many of them are lucky to get a connection of 26,400 kbps or faster on their 56K modems.

In that environment, a reasonably fast page loads in 30 – 45 seconds. Several major technology corporations had pages that took over five minutes to load however. At that kind of snail’s pace, most visitors are going to go to the page they absolutely have to go to, and any other marketing message is going to be lost. I can’t imagine what would have inticed me to visit one extra page on those sites in order to be sold something new.

The lesson, first and foremost, is to CHECK YOUR IMAGES. Make them as small and tightly compressed as possible while still being visually correct.

Second, BE SURE YOU USE HEIGHT AND WIDTH TAGS on ALL images. If images in tables have height and width tags, then at least the table can load and people can look at your text while the images are coming. Which brings us to…

Third, LOOK AT YOUR TEXT MESSAGE. Assuming you have size tags on your images, even on a fast page many visitors are going to have 30 – 45 seconds to look at the text on a page before the images finish loading. Your marketing message should be spelled out clearly and enticingly in the text, and be able to stand on its own and keep the visitor interested before the graphics arrive. If it doesn’t, they may well hit the back button before your page ever finishes loading.

Of course, we all know these things, but it’s easy to forget, or to decide we’ll come back to the page to deal with that “someday”.

Every so often, however, it’s a Good Thing to go spend a little quality time seeing what your sites look like to the average AOL or MSN dialup user. If you don’t keep your site effective for these users, you are automatically ruling out the majority of users from seeing your message, and leaving money laying on the table.