Home / Computers / Internet

Loading Time

We all know that speed is the key to keeping visitors. I often catch myself getting impatient because it's taking me 20 or 30 seconds to connect to some site or other. Then I stop and think about the fact that here I am, sitting in my office on the east coast of Australia, connecting to a site in the north of England, on the west coast of the US, in Canada, South Africa, India or one of the dozens of other places I regularly contact, and I shake my head in wonder. How quickly we become accustomed to technology.

However, we DO get impatient if it takes us too long to make contact - so you must ensure that your home page at least, loads as quickly as possible. That means no big, flash graphics.

Keep reminding yourself that your first page is like a billboard. When driving your car, you don't have time to read detailed descriptions, or admire intricate pictures on billboards. The signs flash past you and have to make an immediate impression.

Your web visitors are 'flashing past' as well, so keep your front page simple and fast.

There are numerous articles on the net about how to improve speed - take the time to check them out and then discard anything that slows down your home page too much.

Colour, Lay-out and Graphics

The graphics and lay-out of your home page contribute to that first impression - think about what image your site is trying to convey and make sure everything on your site contributes something towards that overall image.

If you have a serious business site, you don't want garish cartoons on your front page - but if you have a games site, then cartoons can be an integral part of the image.

Graphics are what eat up the loading time of your site. A rough rule of thumb to determine good loading time for a page is to keep the entire page around 30k.

Images should be between 6 - 8 k. Each additional 2k adds approximately one second to loading time.

If in doubt, right click the image and then click on Properties to get the size of the image.

Colour is also an important part of your site; colours have different effects on our emotions:

• Red and orange excite the senses and increase heart beat
• Blues and greens are more restful
• Yellow reminds us of sunshine and is a happy colour

Consider the effect you want to create and choose a colour that is appropriate.

When reading Western texts, the eye travels from the top left of the page, across and then down to the bottom right. Remember this when you're placing graphics on your page.

Any graphic which has a directional aspect should be placed to point the eye towards the most important section of the page. If you have a picture of a bird on the top left corner of your page, make sure it is facing inward and that its beak is leading the eye to the centre of the page, not away from it.

The same applies to all graphics:

• Faces should 'look' to the centre of the page
• Cars should be 'parked' facing towards the centre of the page
• Roads, neck ties etc should all be placed to lead the eye across from left to right, or down from top to bottom

This is also why you should place your navigation bars down the left side of your page - it keeps them constantly in the visitor's field of vision.

Readability

This doesn't refer to the words you use (we'll look at them in detail later) - but to the way the words look on the page.

Going back to the concept of the billboard, your words need to stand out on your page - you need to surround them with plenty of white space.

Think over some of the sites you've visited - some make you feel as if you have to duck your head to read them! Dark backgrounds make you feel as if you're in a small space and also have a depressing effect on your mood.

Certain coloured backgrounds make it very difficult to read the text; purples, orange tonings and reds dazzle the eyes.

The colour of your text is just as important - bear in mind that different browsers read colours differently - what looks great on your browser, could well be invisible on another!

Take a lesson from the newspapers and divide your text into columns for easier (and quicker) reading - even two columns are better than one slab of text that covers the entire width of the page.

Another element that contributes to text readability is the font you choose. Plain fonts (Arial, Arial, Garamond and Courier) are the easiest to read. Fancy fonts are fine for headings, but not for full pages (imagine trying to read a whole page in Gothic, Script, Westminster, or Cloister). Your eyes would soon tire of the effort involved and you'd be reaching for the back button!

See what I mean?