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Have you found that today’s websites are adapting the television concept?
Web pages are loaded with state-of-the-art graphics, sounds, and videos nowadays. Ads are now rampant to top it all up. You get to see a lot of items or services being sold on one single page alone. One wonders if websites give television a run for their money.
But what website owners are missing is that they are not there to watch television with their guests. If they were, they would not be searching in the first place on your web.
There are visitors there for a purpose; to get data quickly and leave. Chances are your tourists will be long gone with all the stuff you have put into your site before your main page can even load. The truth is, on a screen that is between 15 and 19 inches tall, most are viewing your page, can only see 216 colors, and can only download at 28.8 kb per second.
You should ensure that you are on a 28.8 link as a website owner; type in the URL for your web page; click enter, and hold your breath. Your web page needs to be no bigger than 50K. The best is less than 30K.
Take note that the home page of the number one website visited is under 21k. You understood correctly. Just 20k is Yahoo’s home page. One of the key reasons why every part of the world is very famous. This may seem to be so little, but within that scale, you can really do a lot.
Why is it what you do?
Using fewer graphics and more design. In order for a web page to succeed, it needs to be easy to download and look fine. The most popular problem faced by owners is that they are torn between quickly downloading and looking fine.
Instead of designing graphics and taking pictures and turning them into jpg to make your web page look good, try using color schemes. Use cell colors to make borders. Use the negative space on your web site. What is not there is just as important as what is there.
Remember sometimes less is more. When in doubt think of a typical visitor coming to your web page. Would that extra graphic sell them or keep them coming back again and again. If the answer is yes, by all means, keep it.
If the answer is “well maybe” or “it just looks good there”, yank it. Viewers will appreciate not waiting for more than they have to. The web is here to make our life easier not to sit in front of a screen waiting for heavy web pages to download.