[thelist] Web Page Response Times....

Sarah Adams mr.sanders at geekjock.ca
Tue Nov 14 08:34:37 CST 2006


> Regarding the other discussion, I didn't really get any solid feeding on 
> response times.  I 'guessed' when I said 4 seconds as the patience 
> factor for high speed connections.  8-10 seconds might be acceptable for 
> modem users or even more if they are in dire need of the content.  I 
> looked at a site the other day, the audience should be a range of local 
> viewers (small local biz).  Currently the home page is over 900K, mostly 
> due to 2 images (one a transitional .gif of over 500k).  Seems 
> borderline for broadband and impossible for modem.  No median, no 
> balance.     -Bob

Keep in mind that users shouldn't have to wait for the entire page to
load before seeing some content. Some tips for making this happen:
- make sure you aren't just using images for content and give the users
enough text to read while images are loading
- include good alt text [1] for your images so the user has an idea of
what they will see once each image loads
- set the width and height of all images so the browser can calculate
the page layout before the images load
- order the page content/markup in logical order (e.g. content before
navigation), and use CSS to position it on the page (e.g. navigation on
the left, content on the right); this will make the browser start
loading the most important content first (someone correct me if I'm
wrong about this)

[1] http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/alt/alt-text.html

-- 
sarah adams
web developer & programmer
portfolio: http://sarah.designshift.com
blog: http://hardedge.ca



More information about the thelist mailing list