Relationship between page load time/file size and traffic productivity:
 

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.

Packing everything into one huge table is completely retarded and any webmaster doing that deserves a smack on the back of the head.

Does anyone know if Mozilla renders the table contents before the entire table is loaded?

but then again it also depends on the size of the table contents. if it's plain text ~ who cares, it'll be loaded within seconds.

Old netscpae version prior to 6.x will take ages to load the table, so make small tables.
NEtscape 6 and 7 will load the table and will render it very fast, even that it's slower than IE when rendering complex tables.

Not sure -- as I said before I have noticed that MSIE has made improvements in this area... I wish we had an expert here on this so I wouldn't have to guess -- I'm sure I have some bad HTML coding habits... but really who wants to surf on dialup to do these kinds of tests... :( broadband I think i heard on CNN is 25% of internet users...?

It seems like eventually tables will be a non-issue -- because all the text should load first -- but maybe Microsoft doesn't have "us" in mind when prioritizing the changes to the IE rendering engine :p

exactly my mistake 2 years ago, as i changed it, traffic doubled overnight (from 80 to 160k this time).

notice that in vBulletin, each post is in a seperate table, so it doesnt have to wait for the whole page to load before you can start seeing posts.