Quick Downloads

You'll notice that we've mentioned download times in several of the design principles. It is important to remember that many of your site's visitors may still be using slower dialup connections. Studies show that visitors have patience to wait only about 8 seconds for a page to download. After that, they are likely to click away to another page. To keep downloads fast, we use the following techniques:

• Keep images as small as possible, without compromising quality.
• Reuse images where possible.
• Use cascading style sheets to centralize style information.
• Use text instead of images of text for menu options. (Images take longer to download than text.)

We also hand-code the final versions of our web designs to clean out redundant or unnecessary code. This hand-coding also increases the stability of the site, making it robust across multiple browser platforms.