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Written by Greg Watson April 11, 2006 For years, I closely adhered to design principles of creating fast loading web pages. However, over the last year I have tended to focus on other issues and pay significantly less attention to the speed at which new pages can be loaded. What a shock this morning when I looked at stats for one of my newest websites that showed that 30.43% of visitors to this site were dial-up users. Now I don't know how accurate that statistic is -- but regardless, it indicates that a significantly greater number of internet users are still on dial-up than I had intuitively presumed... Greg Watson Written by Carrie Cassidy April 12, 2006 Thanks for pointing this out, Greg, because so few designers seem to consider it any more. My apartment, from which I do all my online shopping, is on dial-up. Migration to broadband is impractical for me and for others in my situation. As web designers are (re)considering load times, also please count the number of pages a shopper clicks through. I leave a site that routes me through extra pages because I have to wait for all the headers, footers, and side bars to load each time. (I never know what those teaser headlines on AOL are all about because it takes too many clicks to actually get to the selected story.) Regards, Carrie Cassidy datavantagecorp.com Written by Mark Whitman April 12, 2006 I develop all sorts of projects and have taken the same attitude as you, load times aren't nearly as critical as they were a few years ago. There are lots of other developers out there who feel the same way and are developing sites that reflect this attitude. Ok, so you "only" have 70% high speed user access, that's an overwhelming majority. As more and more developers, including those with conversion rate on their mind (like me), use larger (within reason) files etc on their sites the relatively few dialup users will just have to get used to waiting longer for pages to load. I'm guessing it's already a common experience for them. And how much longer will dialup even be an issue? The population of dialup users is shrinking by leaps and bounds every month. Next year maybe 15% of your users will be dialup, maybe 5% the next year. So it gets to be like the screen resolution issue -- how low do you go when setting a "lowest common denominator"? Is there *anyone* developing sites for 640x480 resolution anymore? I highly doubt it. Does anyone develop sites that load fast for users with 14.4 modems? Maybe a couple but IMHO there's no need to worry about dialup users, they're "surfing" slower everywhere these days and they'll be virtually extinct before long. Mark Whitman Written by Steven Rothberg April 13, 2006 I think that you'll find that the connection speed for users of various sites will vary tremendously site-to-site. Those sites which are used primarily by lower and moderate income consumers from their homes are more likely to be used at dial-up speeds. Our career site is primarily used by college students and recent graduates, so only 13 percent of our users are connecting at dial-up speeds. If you don't know information such as this about your users and want to know it (all site owners should want to know it because it greatly impacts architectural decisions such as whether to build a graphically rich but therefore slower site), then get your web hosting company to provide you with tracking reports. They should be free. If your hosting company won't provide those to you for free, then get Google Analytics. It is free and awesome. Steven Rothberg CollegeRecruiter.com Written by Lee Roberts April 13, 2006 Dial-up versus Broadband access has always been misleading information. Nielsen//NetRatings posted an article a month or so back that said 95+ million active US Internet subscribers are using broadband. eMarketer wrote a piece about Nielsen's article entitled "Two-Thirds of US Web Users Now On Broadband" [requires a paid subscription]. The assumption and reasoning is absurd. Broadband access is based upon the availability of faster than ISDN access within in a geographical location. Satellite access is considered broadband and because HughesNet and DishNetwork both offer satellite access to the 48 contiguous states, access is considered to be 100% saturation. This does not mean that everyone wants to pay the rates for satellite access. The cost to purchase the equipment required for satellite access is considerably higher than that of DSL and cable. DSL and cable access is greatly limited. With more than 45% of the US population in non-DSL and non-cable access areas, how then can 95+ million Web users be subscribed to faster then ISDN service when it isn't really available to them? Statistics and analytic software that analyzes Web access does not consider the use of ISP proxies nor the time of day the accesses are made. However, reviewing access times will typically reveal that 75 - 80% of a site's traffic is made during the day when people are using their employer's broadband access. Many reports have shown that this pattern is a result of several factors: 1. People's lives are busier than prior to the Internet era. 2. Families with one computer often see the parents accessing the Internet from work versus from home 3. Children have different focuses and their access patterns are reversed from the majority of adults. This leads to reversed access patterns with the high during the evening. But, who am I to know ... like many of the LED readers I live on my computer. Sincerely, Lee Roberts roserockdesign.com applepiecart.com Written by Tracy Coyle April 14, 2006 > What a shock this morning when I looked at stats... that showed > that 30.43% of visitors to [my new site] site were dial-up users. - Greg Watson Imagine my surprise that some web designers consider 30% of potential customers not important. I use dial-up. Despite the fact that everyone I know complains that as an early adopter of everything internet, I should have been on broadband a long time ago. We have a home office, 80% of our time spent there, and an office to see clients, 20% of our time there. Broadband is not available in our client seeing office - old area, old building, ornery landlords. So, I would have to maintain TWO accounts, one to access broadband at home (at a cost of $60 per month) and one to access at client office (at an additional cost of $20 per month) or I can keep my dial-up service at $20 , use it both places and save the money. Duh!? 95% of our internet work is email and court filings and the speed is almost completely irrelevant. I also design our websites (I have 6 sites I maintain) and load times are less than 10 secs for 28k across the board. Even those sites that are heavily dependent on databases (dailyblognews.com for one). Designers that create sites with noticeable load times even for broadband - even if it is only a couple of seconds - are not in my opinion, doing their clients any good. Tracy Coyle Written by James Miller April 14, 2006 Not paying attention to loading times is just sloppy. I have broadband here in deepest Suffolk in the UK, but all I get is a 500Kb connection as I'm just on the limit of broadband from my exchange. My son gets several times this in Winchester, which is a major town of about 50,000 people. So don't believe because someone has broadband, they can download a large file in seconds. But still it's a lot better than dialup. A few rules that web site designers should use :- 1) The most important is that if you can, follow the dear old BBC. Their web site must be one of the busiest in the world and each page is a separate HTML page. No on-line database or complicated ASP etc. means that there is much less handshaking before the actual page arrives in your browser. 2) Compress graphics. I've seen sites that use a 250Kb gif, when if it was compressed it would be perhaps a quarter of this. 3) Use proper small images rather than large ones with a height and width. Some galleries do this and they are excruciatingly slow. 4) If you want a large image, put the small one in a web page and ask people to click for the large. 5) Don't use complicated menus that need a whole load of unnecessary junk to be downloaded from the Internet. 6) Keep pages reasonably small. Don't have a long page that goes on and on. 7) If you have a large PDF document on your site, put up an HTML preview of some of it, so punters can check if they want to spend a long time downloading. I actually don't like PDF, as it's another thing for the punter to install. 8) Avoid Flash. Never seen any point to it anyway, as it just annoys clients. But above all keep things simple, even if this means a few more pages. James Miller daisy.co.uk Written by Andreas Huttenrauch April 14, 2006 > Ok, so you "only" have 70% high speed user access, that's > an overwhelming majority... the relatively few dialup users > will just have to get used to waiting longer for pages to load. - Mark Whitman I disagree with Mark's opinions on loading times. If 30% of visitors are on dialup, that means you could increase site revenue by almost 43% simply by catering to these users. Same goes for lower resolutions. Is their money not good enough? Furthermore, as broadband and low resolutions are shrinking, their counterparts in mobile devices are coming in strong. Slow connections and low resolutions will not get "extinct" for a very long time. A site should be designed with the end-user in mind. Not the designer. Andreas Huttenrauch Globi Web Solutions globi.ca Written by Tom Anson April 14, 2006 Hi all you fellow LED-ers. I'm really not surprised at all that Greg Watson found that such a high percentage of his site visitors (30.43%) were still on dial-up. And, while it is true that this still leaves about 70% who are on high speed (as Mark Whitman points out), depending on your market, it might not be wise to be as dismissive as Mark seems to be. Dial-up may go the route of 640x480 screen resolutions and 14.4 modems (and other dinosaurs), but you need to know your market. Not everyone has the option to have state-of-the-art internet (as Carrie Cassidy pointed out). And, as Lee Roberts noted, many adults access the internet during the day from work. For my website, a high percentage of customers that come during the evening hours are on dial-up; most coming during the day are at work. Even a lot of my newsletter subscribers are having the newsletter sent to a work email address. While I don't think we should be enslaved to those whose set-up is somewhat behind the times, there are a few things that can be done for their benefit without constricting our design too much. Avoiding tables (or at least defining the size of each element in a table) and defining the size of graphics helps with loading times quite a lot (I've been told). And, as Carrie noted, keeping the number of clicks required to accomplish a task to a minimum is a great idea. IMHO, dial-up is not the enemy. Placing ourselves in the center of design choices is. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials Written by Salem Kashou April 14, 2006 Hello Everybody! Lots of smart points regarding loading times and viewer effect. It's also smart to consider the flipside: the webmaster. Most sites load slowly for a few reasons, but mainly due to images and over-coding. Depending on circumstances, there should be careful consideration to all causes. Over the years I have observed that many successful enterprises use less images, while image placement becomes more strategic. My main point: If a site has fewer images, it should be easier to maintain, which saves the viewer loading time and, webmaster image-editing time (those billing by the hour will have to spend more time doing other things to spur client ROI). What this leads to is the inherant benefit of having more text (SEO) and, bear with me, a reduction of image-stealing, the concern du jour. It seems there are a few types of webmaster: the creatives and marketers. Assumptions: The creatives are images-heavy and not always text-conscious while the marketers are search-aware, code heavy and use a google-esque appearance. Based on these assumptions, who do you think is best suited to increase traffic / money? The answer should help guide loading time concerns. Happy Easter! Salem Kashou portioncontrol.com Written by Roy Williams April 17, 2006 This is an interesting thread, but one thing seems to have been forgotten. If you can reduce your page size by trimming down graphics and removing redundant spaces from the HTML, the page WILL load faster. Because there is less work for the server to do, it can do its job quicker. A slow server is a slow server, even with a broadband connection. We all know that. If you can reduce the work that the server has to do, your pages will load faster, and with some hosting accounts, you'll save yourself money! Real gone, Roy Williams nervous.co.uk Written by Brad Waller April 17, 2006 For some added stats, I checked the numbers for our EPage.com site which is catered to the general public (as opposed to hi tech), and I found only 13% on dialup. AdJungle has more high end users, and it shows 10% on dialup. I'm not saying that this means we should bloat the pages, but this does mean that we can add useful content to the pages at the expense of load times. Users do value having larger images to view when they look at the thumbnails on the listing pages and larger images on the ad pages, so we have enlarged those over the years. We have added other small images and increased page size by a factor of two or three since 1994 when we started. This goes along with the screen size issue. We used to maintain very austere pages that could fit into 600 pixels or so wide displays. That meant images on ad pages had to be 400 pixels wide. Now we allow images to be up to 468 pixels wide. We still keep the JPEG quality low to save bandwidth, but the larger picture makes for a better ad for our customers. Those on dialup can choose to browse with images off, like I used to when I had dialup. As for display size, less than 1% have screens smaller than 800x600! Brad Waller adjungle.com Written by Dave Starr April 17, 2006 > Imagine my surprise that some web designers > consider 30% of potential customers not important... > Designers that create sites with noticeable load > times... are not doing their clients any good. - Tracy Coyle Couldn't agree more with Tracy's comments. The reasons viable customer may not have broadband are legion. To dismiss 30+ percent of potential customers out of hand is the thinking of a design-geek, not a business person. Pretty designs have absolutely no value unless they are accessed. Think of it this way ... if the site is designed and optimized to load with reasonable speed on dialup, it will load in the blink of an eye on a broadband user's screen. I've never yet caught myself complaining about a site loading too fast. Is there any good evaluation software out there that allows a designer to simulate site interaction at various connections speeds? Would be a useful tool, methinks. Please the person with the credit card in hand, not the technology enthusiast. Dave Starr Written by Mark Whitman April 17, 2006 > If 30% of visitors are on dialup, that means you could increase > site revenue by almost 43% simply by catering to these users. > Same goes for lower resolutions. Is their money not good enough? - Andreas Huttenrauch As expected, there was much disagreement and misunderstanding of my suggestion that worrying about blazing fast page loads for dialup users is not necessary. I didn't suggest that anyone load up their site with 500k graphics and huge Flash headers etc so that it's unbearable for dialup users. I also didn't suggest that download times are not important. What I meant specifically was that using *somewhat* larger graphics (and even I'm not a fan of using large Flash files) than those used in the 90's will not reduce conversion rates or sales. I probably could have worded my original post better. I have not created a single commercial site with less than 6% conversion rate (of those I've kept track of) in many years so I feel confident that using a few 25K - 50k files on a page if necessary does not slash sales or other types of conversion. Since so many sites are using larger graphics and more Flash these days dialup users are surely getting used to pages loading a bit slower than in previous years. Do dialup users immediately leave any site that doesn't download instantaneously? I doubt it, otherwise they'd be spending lots of time looking for sites with no more than a few 5k graphics on them. Yes, dialup users will probably leave a site if it has an elaborate 500K flash header or other unreasonably large graphics all over it however that's not what I was suggesting. Page load time *is* important, that's common knowledge, and every professional developer / marketer, including me, pays attention to download times. My experience tells me that what's *not* important in 2006 however, in terms of conversion rate on commercial sites is restricting all graphics file sizes to 1-10k or calculating if the sum total of all files on a page is under 50k as was the rule of thumb about *10 years ago*. Andreas' claim that "catering" to less than a third of site users by degrading the site so that it loads in a couple seconds for dialup users will result in an automatic 43% increase in revenue does not compute. I'm not knocking dialup users or saying that they are not important but the Internet is moving ahead with or without them and I believe it won't be long before dialup is a memory people will joke about. Remember trying to develop sites that also look good in the old AOL browsers? Does anyone check sites with an old AOL browser anymore? Some people might still use it, isn't their money good enough? :) Mark Whitman Written by Martha Retallick April 18, 2006 > Most sites load slowly for a few reasons, but mainly > due to images and over-coding... I have observed that > many successful enterprises use less images, while > image placement becomes more strategic. - Salem Kashou To which I say, from atop my Web Standards soapbox: You can reduce the amount of coding needed on your sites by switching to Web Standards-based design. The advantage, especially for the dialup people in your audience is that your pages will download and display faster. This means that your audience will be more willing to stick around and see what you have to say. And studies show that using Web Standards will reduce the "weight" of your site by 25-50%. BTW, I've tested Standards-based sites on dialup and compared them with sites using tables for layout. I've found that the tables-based sites give the visitor that "blank screen" display for several seconds, and sometimes that can stretch out to minutes on a very slow connection. OTOH, the Standards-based sites come up almost instantly. Martha Retallick Western Sky Communications Written by Ed Clark April 18, 2006 > Not paying attention to loading times is just sloppy. - James Miller In reply to James Miller and being sloppy. I have a couple of slow loading sites. While I am also stuck with dial-up at my work location, I realize the problem this creates. However, some sites will just have to be what they are... slow. I personally like flash and animation. I like structure, and several other things that increase loading times. Some sites are like a very large department store... you must walk a long way to get to the department you are going to purchase from. Or you can go into the local small store, pay more, have less choice and feel like you are stuffed into a sock. So for what most are saying about loading time. Put some useful content that loads fast to keep interest alive, and tell the people that the loading time is worth the wait. Ed Clark Written by Edward A. Locke April 18, 2006 > ... Since so many sites are using larger graphics > and more Flash these days dialup users are surely > getting used to pages loading a bit slower than > in previous years. ... - Mark Whitman I wouldn't bet on that. Many dial-up users (myself included) routinely use Flash blockers or just uninstall Flash altogether. ESPN's Flash-heavy website drove me to uninstall Flash months ago. I haven't missed it. Edward A. Locke Written by Nancy Cardinali April 18, 2006 An interesting topic. Our local newspaper recently reported our local phone lines (San Rafael, CA) are to be replaced with fiber optics, making dial-up a lot faster. So, dial-up may not be on its way out after all! Nancy Cardinali Written by John Barendrecht April 19, 2006 > I've found that the tables-based sites give the visitor > that "blank screen" display for several seconds, and > sometimes that can stretch out to minutes on a very > slow connection. - Martha Retallick If you want to speed up table based designs, make the first table contain a small banner only and put the body into another table. The header will display almost instantaneously and users won't get that blank screen display. One thing we can do for most browsers is to send compressed files (gzip or deflate) to decrease load times. Although my home page is almost 19K (HTML), it is sent to the browser compressed (5K - 72% saving). This makes the page load about 3.5 times faster; about 0.7 seconds rather than 2.6 seconds on a 56K modem. Images are small but add another 48 K to page size. Users can read HTML while graphics are downloading. We also strip out all white space and use cache control. If you go to another page where the banner, images or left menu is the same, the graphics are not downloaded again but we tell the browser to use the images in the client's browser cache. Martha's HTML is small but she has a couple large graphics (100K + 40K). I guess it is always a trade-off between design and speed. Someone else previously mentioned the fact that getting a fast server is important. Using a tool like Internet Supervision I notice that some web servers are faster and others are 2 to 4 times slower. Nancy Cardinali mentioned her phone line will be fiber optics. Copper wire phone lines can already handle high speed DSL. I have a 2.5 MB DSL over copper. It is her ISP's infrastructure that gives slow dial up. Although every one is predicting the death of dial-up, we now have to contend with Wi-Fi, which generally seems as slow as a 56 K modem. I'm working on redesigning my site to load faster for Wi-Fi. I do want to sell to customers at Starbucks or bored business persons at the airport. Best regards, John Barendrecht Centralhome.com Company Inc. Written by David Spahr April 19, 2006 There is a lot of assuming going on here. Assuming that loading times must be fast is painting with too broad of a brush. The nature of the site content and the visitor's expectations must be assessed before making any such judgement about the need for fast loading times. I sell photographs. Selling photographs requires loading lots of jpgs. Visitors to my sites realize this. They know up front that photos take time to load. Moreover, they need to be delivered a photograph online that has adequate size and resolution to be able to determine if they want to buy it. If you are a photograph buyer / collector on a regular basis as most are, you quickly realize how much you need broadband. Obviously, persons with enough disposable income to collect vintage and art photographs probably have the money to pay a few extra bucks for broadband if they can get it. Some people with dial-up can't get broadband but many are living on a budget that does not allow it. These are not the ones that are likely to be my customers. Know the visitor and the product before making assumptions. David Spahr stereoviews.com Written by Tom Aman April 19, 2006 > Our local newspaper recently reported our local phone lines > are to be replaced with fiber optics, making dial-up a lot faster. > So, dial-up may not be on its way out after all! - Nancy Cardinali Dial-up is likely to be with us for a very, very long time yet. One big factor is that, for many people, high speed connection to the Internet is just not available. Here in Ontario, Canada, there is one county I know of locally where the only access is via dial-up. Work is under way in that county to make high speed available, but that will take some time to become a fact and even then, for some locations, it will still not be accessible (too remote from the necessary connection). I know from reading various articles that this kind of situation is repeated in many areas both here in Canada as well as in the USA. While I realize that satellite communication makes high speed access for download (site to user) available to almost anyone, the response will still go out via a *much* slower telephone connection. In addition, compared to the dial-up rates, satellite can be expensive and may also require the purchase of special hardware (like a satellite receiver) so this does not really represent a viable option for many home users. So the reality is that, for many people, high speed access is just not an option - either due to location or cost or both. Tom Aman cyberspyder.com Written by Steve Warriner April 20, 2006 > Is there any good evaluation software out > there that allows a designer to simulate site > interaction at various connections speeds? - Dave Starr Go to watson.addy.com. Fill in your URL, check "Compute estimated download speeds" and submit. Steve Warriner Written by Martha Retallick April 20, 2006 Well, here I am again, the creator of sites with large graphics and a tub-thumper for Web Standards. Talk about a contradiction. Any-hoo, my conflicted self would like to add this US $.02 worth to the broadband vs. dialup loading times discussion. I had dialup for many, many years before I was finally able to get DSL. This was because the phone company was slow to bring DSL to where I was living (and working), and also because the landlady forbade me from having cable service installed. During this time, I became increasingly aware that clients and potential clients were not too impressed with my saying that I'd have to look at their website after I got off the phone. (At the time, I only had one phone line, which was used for the dialup Internet and voice calls. This was because the landlady wasn't too wild about the idea of my having a second phone line installed.) Well, in July 2004, I ditched the dialup for DSL, and I noticed a positive effect on my productivity, and on how clients reacted to my work setup. In November 2004, I ditched the landlady and moved into my own house. And one of my first decisions as a homeowner was to ditch the DSL for even-faster cable Internet, and productivity went up another notch. Moral of this Story: Having broadband has had a positive effect on my productivity and on how my business is perceived by others. I wouldn't go back to dialup on a bet. Martha Retallick westernskycommunications.com Written by Tom Aman April 20, 2006 > Visitors to my sites... need to be delivered > a photograph online that has adequate size > and resolution to be able to determine if > they want to buy it. - David Spahr One thing that can be done with images is to use software to optimize them. *Optimize*, in this context, means to reduce the file size with little or no loss in apparent image quality. It is very often possible to reduce the file size of an image file by as much as 50% (so the 100K graphic becomes 50K, the 40K image becomes 20K) although the actual reduction achieved will vary with the actual image and its use. A greater loss in quality to gain speed can often be tolerated for some images, while relatively high quality (= less optimization) must be maintained for others (such as David's photographs). But the optimization is still worth doing, even for small image files. The effect can be a dramatic decrease in page loading times. One product that does this is ULead's Smart Saver Pro. There are others but I mention this one because I have used this product for a number of years and have always been happy with the results. Of course buying such software (Smart Saver Pro is $59.95US) only makes sense if you need to optimize large numbers of images or if you want lots of control over the process. Optionally, there are free alternatives, some online, some downloadable, that give varying degrees of control and various levels of quality for the output although, for the most part, they do a good job. Some free sites are: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer http://www.netmechanic.com/GIFBot/optimize-graphic.htm http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html (requires a membership to download the most optimized images meaning anything over ~30% in file size reduction). Do a Google search for *image optimizer* for more choices of sites and / or software. Tom Aman Aman Software Written by Jim King April 20, 2006 > I've found that the tables-based sites give the visitor > that "blank screen" display for several seconds, and > sometimes that can stretch out to minutes... - Martha Retallick I agree about tables. If you rely on AdSense or other outside sites (Amazon, a counter, a script, etc.) to complete the rendering of your pages and they are in a table on your page and the outside site happens to be down or slow to respond, your visitors can wait a long time for the browser to time-out even on a fast connection, and you could lose a potential visitor or sale. IE is especially notorious for waiting to see all the table elements before rendering. More than just web standards and validation, learning CSS and using div elements is worth the effort. Jim King Comments (0)
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