Mar 12
Does size still matter?
2004 at 02.07 am posted by Veerle
When designing a website I always think of the graphical part first and I deal with all technical questions later on how to translate the design in to a real webpage as ”light” as possible. Of course even in the design stage I do think of the limitations and take them in account so I won’t get surprised once I start building my webpage.
It is always a challenge to create beautiful designs and make them as light as possible. This doesn’t always go hand in hand. I always wonder how far can I go in size? A lot of people have broadband these days but still a lot of other don’t. It’s not always obvious to answer a question like this. I always heard that the psychological boundary is 100 KB, which is really not much. In theory this is great but a serious pain in the bud in practice!
I use FireWorks instead of Photoshop just to export my gifs and jpegs because I’ve noticed that FireWorks does a better job in compressing those images.
My personal feeling when visiting a website is that I’m prepared to hold on a bit longer when it looks good and there’s already a clue of what the content inside will be.
Do you still think about all those “low-banders” out there? What’s your size limit? Are there any tricks you would like to share with us?
Update: According to a study conducted by the European Union in January of this year, 12% of the Belgian population has broadband. Belgium takes the 2nd place just after Denmark who has the most broadband connections in Europe (13%). Last year 8% of the Belgian people had broadband.
13served
1
I tend to build webpages from the technics perspective. I know what’s possible (css/xhtml wise), and I build from that forward.
It’s my way to deal with the xhtml/css scripting of a website. And from that forward, I just don’t use a lot of images, and I never look at the size of the site.
2
I care about the size (erm, erm) for I think it does matter. I can’t tell I follow the rules I set by myself. Logo on my site has 50k which is too much. This will be fixed in a few days. That is why I cut down the length of main index. Now it displays only five last entries.
Here, in Poland, dial-ups are still in the majority, thus the 56kbps limit is still a case. Sites with overwhelming eye-candy graphics take ages to load and usually are dispatched by users. No wonder. I am a bit skewed for at work a have a broad bandwidth connection; at home I have a 128kbps cable which satisfies me fully.
Tricks you may consider: if your site is to be informative - limit yoursefl to plain text with HTML markup. This seems to be enough to convey the essence of what you want to say. In my daily blogging I use Movable Type; pages it generates are bloated thus I use MTOptimize HTML plugin which shrinks my pages dramatically.
3
I think the size of a web page’s download package doesn’t matter as much as it used to, but it’s still an important consideration. Like anything, look to your intended audience for your answer.
I try to keep the sizes down out of habit, and mostly use Photoshop’s Save For Web interface to compress the graphics.
4
It depends geographically. In Greece 56k is the norm, though many people are interested in buying ADSL, but it’s not so cheap.
And yes, a page with a flashy widgets that makes your page 200k is a no-no.
(Home)Page size does matter.
5
I can’t say I have a specific target size, but I do think the size matters on what the site is.
Weblogs, news, etc anything you visit over and over need to be much lighter I think than sites you only view ocationally. Like if it’s a company site that’s showing off a product, I think you can get away with more (relevant) images.
6
I will design for dial-up until acurate stats show that dial-up is dead (like 1–5%). I wish I could use full-screen 1600px wide background images (or even large banners) with confidence, but the people on dial up will be REALLY frustrated.
I think hi-fi/lo-fi style sheets are quite realistic, and the saving-grace of CSS and well-structured mark-up is that the content can load and position before the big stuff (with careful planning), giving the user access to the content straight away.
Broadband may have decent penetration, but we’ll have to wait a while yet (like waiting for Netscape 4 to die) before dial-up can be discarded as a true minority.
The upside of tight optimisation is that broadband users are going to see really fast sites and pages, which can only be a good thing.
7
Veerle: is that 12% of the total population of 12% of the surfing population here in Belgium?
I’m still making pages with little graphics. I think that if it doesn’t contribute to the design or of it isn’t really needed, it doesn’t have to be used. On the other hand it’s possible that my Photoshop skills are just too poor :-) And I think it also really depends on your target audience. Like your site is mainly visited by other webdesigners I guess, and I think most of them have a good internet connection, a fast one.
But when it comes to sites that have to provide information to anyone, I think it’s best to use little images and so. Or compress them very well and use thumbnails if you really need to show something big with addition of the bytesize so visitors know how big the image they’re about to see, is.
8
(I’ll have to learn to read again. It clearly says “of the Belgian population”. Stupid me ... Sorry :-) It’s always better to read twice, I think)
9
@Fabian, according to the article I read it is 12% of the total population (surfing or not surfing), so that’s a lot.
10
The best insight you can get into this issue is to read “Speed Up Your Site” by Andrew King. Not only does the book do a very good job of detailing current trends in broadband (and why file size still matters), but it also explores so many fascinating ways of speeding up webpages that it is worth it alone to learn about html and css tags that most people ignore but that can greatly speed up sites.
Ok, so aside from recommending the book, there are numerous studies that show that the highest correlation for usability of a site is related to the speed of the site. Speed impacts usability and perceived quality as well as all of the things we normally think about. Finally, in King’s book, he documents how the speed of our connections have on average increased, but the size of our web pages is growing at a faster rate than the connection speeds.
11
It seems to me that designing with web standards fits in nicely with consideration for speed and size of webpages.
12
just a quick note about this page: the light layout and design on your pages looks great, but the grey text is nearly impossible to read with a somewhat bad eyesight (+ a mediocre laptop screen). somewhat darker text might be good for your readers.
13
I recently stayed with a freind who could only get 56k dial-up BUT the wiring would only allow about 25-30k anyway. This is in the heart of suburbia in a modern Australian city. I was shocked and it changed my outlook even though i’m fairly size concious anyway.