THE NEED FOR SPEED
Don’t you find it absolutely annoying when the website you are visiting is taking forever to load? It is such a waste of time waiting for a website to complete its download, and it is always irritating to keep pressing the F5 key or clicking the refresh button just to be able to view a webpage. I am sure many of us will have had this happen to them and are in agreement, besides I have lost count of the sites I have visited and got so frustrated waiting for a page to download I just close the window and move-onto another website that will load more quickly.
We all know that speed is an integral component that must be considered in web design. It is practically useless to have a spectacular-looking webpage that is so rich in graphics and animation but then takes an eternity to load, especially on slow connections. All the efforts that a web designer puts into making a website attractive only goes to waste if the download speed of the website is taken for granted.
Besides, it is not all that difficult to keep a website running and displaying graphics and text with a good download speed. It is simply a matter of keeping all elements of the website’s design small and simple. Take images as an example. Loading images can be tremendous torture for anyone who is trying to access a website and making do with a slow connection. Images do give life to the webpage, but for faster loading, a web designer should limit the size of his images to no more than 30 KB each.
The size of the webpage itself should not exceed 150Kb for the sake of speedier loading. Clean, streamlined HTML counts a lot towards taming the size of a webpage, and so web designers should always keep their HTML codes to a minimum. Tags and tag values that are not necessary or are considered default should no longer be included in the code. This makes for a faster reading of the webpage. The same goes for using nestled tables. Nestled tables make it hard for browsers to read.
Sometimes, it is the server where the website is hosted that can cause the web page to load slowly. If the machine or the connection needs upgrading, then by all means, upgrade. All the best web design concepts in the world are useless if the host server where the website sits is running slowly due to lack of memory, or a slow backbone link to the superhighway.
To summarise the need for speed:
Make sure the host server where you intend to upload your WebPages is fast, has a fast interface to the Internet and can handle a large volume of users. Keep you WebPages to 150 kilobytes of below; reducing the size or quality of your graphics can help and can be reduced considerably without effecting picture quality.
