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The First Law of Helpfulness
by Paul "the soaring" Siegel
Have you ever tried to visit a site, and were greeted with lines waving, objects bouncing, and alphabetic characters flying around until - after a seemingly interminable time - they become the name of the company or the website. After this "performance" you are given the privilege of entering the inner sanctum.
They use Flash. They feel you should be impressed. Are you? I'm not.
Entrepreneurs on the Net keep repeating the mantra: "The visitor is king....the visitor is king....the visitor is king." Would you keep a king waiting while you boast how wonderful you are?
Zona Research (http://www.zonaresearch.com), after careful study, determined that the average visitor waits no more than 8 seconds. Can your site be loaded in 8 seconds?
The speed of loading correlates with the weight - the number of bits to be loaded - of the page. Keep your site slim and it will load quickly. It will meet the first law of helpfulness:
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DON'T KEEP YOUR VISITOR WAITING
Site Weight
Byte Level Research did a study on site weight. Site weight is not merely the number of bits in your text. All the images and other embellishments that must be loaded should be included. The company weighed 150 sites and found that most of them are overweight. The median weight was 89 KB, as opposed to an optimum of 60 KB. Jupiter Communications thinks the optimum should be 40 KB.
Lean on the Web is popular just as lean in life is popular. Yahoo has a weight of 37 KB. Google is truly lean with a weight of 12 KB. These are helpful sites. They load fast. They do not keep the visitor waiting.
Weight Loss
Here are a few ways to reduce the weight of your page:
- Avoid fat technologies, like Flash
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Minimize page size
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Use line drawings instead of pitures. Line drawings, in .GIF format
are leaner than pictures, which must be in .JPEG format
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Reduce the number of images on a page
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Reduce animation
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Reduce image size
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Reduce number of colors in image
If you must have a fat page, for whatever reason, you may reduce the effective waiting time of the visitor, as follows:
- LINK SMALL IMAGE TO BIGGER IMAGE - Reduce the image to postage-stamp size and include a link to the full-sized image on another page. Warn the visitor about the loading time of the bigger image. This technique is used by art galleries that must deal with large images.
- PLACE FAT IMAGE ON BOTTOM OF PAGE - If you must include a large image, place it on the bottom of the page. The visitor will read the top portion of the page, while the image is loading.
- USE SEVERAL TABLES - Many page designers use HTML tables to place items in specific locations on the page. If the table contains the whole page. the loading process waits until it can see the end of the table before loading the contents. By using a separate table for the top part of the page, this portion will load first and quickly.
Summary
The first law of Helpfulness is: DON'T KEEP YOUR VISITOR WAITING. Get your site to load in 8 seconds or less by making its weight 60 KB or less.
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