designers - where do you draw the line?
 

When making any web page, in this case i'll refer to an average paysite splash page, there needs to be a balance between the quality of the images on the page and the size (in kb) of the files. I usually aim for around 100kb for each page of a paysite.

My question is what you think is an acceptable total file size per page and what is too much to be considered worth waiting for for the average user?

under 70k a page. dialup takes 2 long to get 100k..
If you aint got em in 10-15 secs they will fuck off. :2 cents:

60 - 70k is good!

60k-70k no more.. you will lose your 56k users.

You say that like it's a bad thing... Ok it IS a bad thing, but what I don't understand is that these 56k'ers will pay $39.99 or whatever per month on a porn site membership, but not a penny on a decent connection? Granted there are still a lot of places that don't HAVE high speed internet...



What the Hell was my point again? :eek7

We go for 80-90k without complaints.
-max

the average mike w design is around 120k. some more.. some less.. Given his pre-eminence in the industry he must be doing something right. Much more than that is getting too much unless you're using girl's profiles.

i aim for a 10sec load time on a 56k

Well, in my opinion, it doesn't really matter. Any page size (within reason up to 150k) is fine, as long as you do SOMETHING to grab the surfer's attention while the rest of the page loads.

Whether it's a quick flash animation that says, "FUCK YOU SURFER!!! YOUR MOM'S A FUCKING HOOKER!!! WAIT FOR THIS PAGE TO LOAD YOU COCK SMOKER!!!"... or whatever, but, make it fly around the page while the rest of the page loads, and the surfer really won't care how big the page is.

But, that's just my opinion. If the page is nice, and the site is good, they really won't care. Now, you wouldn't be able to do this on www.this-is-a-porn-site-please-sign-up.com, this would only work on sites that are distinct, and have an appealing title.

Also, keep in mind, that if your site is good enough... and you get the surfer to wait for the page to load the first time, the next time they come back, it may be cached, and will just POP onto their screen. So, as long as you GRAB them the first time they go to your site, you have a better chance that they will come back again and again.

-Voodoo:BangBang:

nice first post!
now go fuck yourself:321GFY

VooDoo: Killer design work on that "Whip" site! Oh yeah:

http://www.moonshadow-productions.co...s/deadbook.jpg

What Voodoo said, make sure your html is correct so that the page & text is rendered first, therefore the surfer has something to read/keep his attention while images load around it.

If you wanted to be daring, i'd create every functional bit of the page in normal text/html that way if the user dosen't want to wait for the fancier stuff (images) they can just proceed, no worries.

Which is why I always make text on a button actual text, instead of being written on the button image. That way they know what the button represents without waiting for the image. :thumbsup

Thats what the alt tag is for

<img src="myimage.gif" alt="Text Here Shows while loading and as tooltip">

maybe you can upsell them to high speed aol in the members area

Yes, Yes, Yes!!! :)
I make it a point to put text links below any graphical interface w/ multiple buttons. I'll put 1 text link for every button on the page. ALT img tags work also, and I use both.

However, I use ALT image tags to further describe the site, and use as many keywords from my meta tags as I can to help w/ SE relevance. If you've got a kick ass splash, you don't normally have room for a bunch of text... So, I compensate w/ Alt tags, and try to cram as much in those as I can. :)

-Voodoo

thanks for the great response everyone.

:)