Hand Me Down Fundraiser

Web pages have great content, a nice design. So why aren’t users clicking through to other parts of the website? In many cases, the problem is the load time. Users are abandoning your site for the simple reason that it just takes too long for the thing to load. How Fast Does It Need to Be? What’s the limit? Ten seconds according to certain studies. These studies say that over a third of users will leave a website that doesn’t load within that time. You’re probably thinking that in the age of broadband, download speeds don’t matter. But remember that in the US, over half of all Internet Users are still using slow dial-up connections. Other countries don’t have quite as many dial-up connections left, but broadband is certainly nowhere near universal. Fast load times are extremely important: usability studies say users Dealing with Infidelity rate them as one of the most important things about a website. Users would much rather use a quick-loading site of average quality than a great site that loads slowly. You’ve no doubt done this yourself at some point. So, you need to pay attention to the size and download speed of your site. Those 10 seconds on a 56k dial-up connection correspond to about 70KB in page size. That means that your HTML and graphics should add up to 70KB as an absolute limit. That’s quite a stringent requirement, and makes every byte count. Reduce Graphics: The first thing you need to do is keep the number of graphics to a minimum. Don’t have graphics for things where text or CSS would do, or where they don’t enhance your information or design significantly. You should consider the web to be a text medium, and justify every graphic.