[thelist] OT: Slower Modems,does it matter?

Liorean Liorean at user.bip.net
Fri Feb 22 12:21:01 CST 2002


At 13:06 2002-02-22 -0500, Bob Boisvert wrote:
>I was just talking to one of my clients about posting his newsletter to his
>site.  In the conversation we had talked about the file size of the document
>and I mentioned it would download rather slowly for those who still have a
>28.8 or 56K modem.
>
>Now to understand this a little better, it's a church web site and most of
>the congregation is in the older category but the target audience is all
>ages.
>
>But what was said to me in the conversation was the people who have the
>slower modems don't care how long the browser takes to load what ever it is
>they want to look at, that's why they are still on the slower modems.
>
>Is this a general feeling among clients and do they actually care about how
>fast or slow the downloading of their web site takes for people with slower
>modem?.

There is the 8 second rule... you should try to follow it. (That is, the
page doesn't have to be finished loading in 8 seconds, but it should be
fully useable without having to wait for further load. Especially important
for highly graphical or ad-burdened designs.)

Oh, and I personally only wait about 30 seconds for pages I know I want to
read, and far less for some site I don't expect to contain utterly
interesting stuff. (I'm on a 56k and have no ability to get better, since
I'm out of range from the ADSL provider and anything else costs too much
for someone without any income at all.) So, I'd say you should at least
think very carefully about making the load too heavy.

(I also seldom load only one site at a time, I tend to have 8-10 sites
loading simultaneously.)

// Liorean




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