Productivity is very important as we know -- and as surfers become ever more demanding with flash graphics especially coupled with the introduction of more "hi bandwidth" connections, we are face with the challence of finding the balance between maximum visual effectiveness (or scale) of your site and the load time of your site (mostly involving image sizes)...
To test this relationship sounds easy at first -- just use the same site to perform productivity tests introducing invisible images that would introduce various loading times -- BUT productivity changes throughout the day so you would have to conduct your tests in a "time window" the same time each day...
There is a bacon of hope here -- there is a way to design your sites so that surfers can click links BEFORE the page has finished loading... This artful bit of advice has been lost on many newschool movie site webmasters who code HTML with no regard for file sizes -- in fact sometimes even on DSL you will have to wait several seconds before you can even *see* any links. This is very bad for productivity! There's a very simple solution. Most web browsers--last I checked--render links/images in stages with regard to the complexity of the tables that you are using! So take the following example will require the surfer to wait LONGER to see any links:
html
table
...
my entire site in this complex table requires longer load time
before surfer can see the first links to click
...
/table
/html
than a site like this:
html
table
...
series of smaller less complex tables that are staggered allow
surfer to see a faster responding site without losing site
complexity
...
/table
table
...
/html
This trick may or may not make a difference as MSIE improves its rendering engine -- and I've noticed that it's a lot better than it used to be about rendering text before images, but the message remains clear -- your surfers shouldn't have to wait 30 seconds before they can see some links -- just because you have some money graphics aimed at broadband users that are taking too long to load for the remaining dialup users.
To test this relationship sounds easy at first -- just use the same site to perform productivity tests introducing invisible images that would introduce various loading times -- BUT productivity changes throughout the day so you would have to conduct your tests in a "time window" the same time each day...
There is a bacon of hope here -- there is a way to design your sites so that surfers can click links BEFORE the page has finished loading... This artful bit of advice has been lost on many newschool movie site webmasters who code HTML with no regard for file sizes -- in fact sometimes even on DSL you will have to wait several seconds before you can even *see* any links. This is very bad for productivity! There's a very simple solution. Most web browsers--last I checked--render links/images in stages with regard to the complexity of the tables that you are using! So take the following example will require the surfer to wait LONGER to see any links:
html
table
...
my entire site in this complex table requires longer load time
before surfer can see the first links to click
...
/table
/html
than a site like this:
html
table
...
series of smaller less complex tables that are staggered allow
surfer to see a faster responding site without losing site
complexity
...
/table
table
...
/html
This trick may or may not make a difference as MSIE improves its rendering engine -- and I've noticed that it's a lot better than it used to be about rendering text before images, but the message remains clear -- your surfers shouldn't have to wait 30 seconds before they can see some links -- just because you have some money graphics aimed at broadband users that are taking too long to load for the remaining dialup users.
broadband I think i heard on CNN is 25% of internet users...?
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