The last topic in this ongoing discussion of effective web design will discuss how much patience the typical user has on your website, and why to have an effective web design you must make sure that you optimize your website with speed in mind.

Speed

One of the top complaints of internet users deals with the speed at which a website is being displayed. The faster your website displays, the faster your users will be able to get to the content they need. Even with today’s affordable high speed internet connection there are still a large number of users who rely on dial up connections or low bandwidth dsl connections (in many cases are only 2x-4x the speed of 56k). One of the goals of being an effective web designer is compatibility and optimizing a website to be viewable to the largest audience possible. If a user cannot connect to your website within a matter of seconds or content is loading too slowly for their taste, rest assured that they will venture elsewhere for that information or goods.

One of the key things to realize is a 100k website will take roughly 20 seconds to load with a 56k modem connection. Keeping each webpage around 30-50k is ideal when trying to effectively design a universally compliant website. Cluttering a page with too many images, or not optimizing images that repeat over and over again using CSS is bad development. It is redundancy that does not need to be downloaded over and over again. Creating a simple thin one pixel line can replace an entire square background image.

Lastly, make sure to stay away from or try to minimize some development issues. For instance there is little to no need to use nested tables. Having multiple table sets on one page will take the browser longer to render out the entire page. An effective web designer needs to be using new solutions like div tags in order to solve many of the nested table issues. Also, when dealing with frames, try to keep the amount of frames to a minimum; for every frame set the browser must request it again. This is an ineffective web design technique that can often lead to trouble with downloads and longer load times. Unfortunately, there is not a lot to be done about the inherent speed of frames. If you use a framed site, then make sure that each frame in the frameset is small and loads quickly. Keep the images small and use small amounts of text.

Websites will only get larger as time passes, but trying to find ways to minimize the total download size can help you reach more clients/users. The speeds of the average internet user has been on the rise for the past 10 years and larger website will be easier to develop due to the ever increasng amount of bandwidth. Keep this in mind when design your own effective website.