Of course it does. Most of my clients are on slow dial-up connections. Most of their clients are,
too. Web pages that load slowly are going to frustrate dial-up users and potentially cause them to leave
the site prematurely.
I realize that people on dial-up are "used to" slow pages (in the same way that soldiers deployed
in Iraq are used to three week mail delivery. It is something you grow accustomed to.
But in the case of the internet, there is something you can do (as a web designer.
First, all images have to be optimized. The size of the image displayed on the page should be the
same "physical" size of the image. I have redesigned a number of web sites that had this basic
flaw. An image that only displayed as 400 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall was actually a 1600 x 1200 image
that was tagged to display smaller. So, although it did not take up the full screen, it was still a 600
kilobyte image. That same image, optimized in Photoshop, was only 30 kilobytes (which translates into several
minutes of download time on dial-up).
So, I make sure all of the images on the pages I design are optimized. Additionally (and although
it is not a component of speed), I also try to use similar aspect ratios on images to ensure the page looks
better - this is critical for database driven sites, but equally important for regular sites.
I am pretty proud of the fact that I design sites that are typically in the top 1% of load time (and a lot
of that is because I know that the visitors are mainly on dial-up - so I have really worked hard learning
how to optimize images).
Alexa.com is a company owned by amazon.com, and they rank web sites from 1 to around 7 million (based on
visits). One of the stats they give about each page is load time (whether the site is fast or slow).
Most of the sites I have designed for my customers are in the top 1%. Here are some examples:
.2 second load time (99% of sites are slower) www.Beau-Vale-Ranch.com
.2 second load time (99% of sites are slower) www.CircleGBoerGoats.com
.2 second load time (99% of sites are slower) www.CircleKBoerGoats.com
.4 second load time (95% of sites are slower) www.RabbitHuntingBeagles.com
.5 second load time (94% of sites are slower) www.NorthernPlainsRanch.com
.7 second load time (88% of sites are slower) www.GoatMeats.com
None of my client sites are slower than that (I could have listed at least 5 more in the top 1%
and another 10 more in that top 10%). My design site is slower (but I think that is because I have some
high profile pages with a lot of images on them (including the rotating banner and the thumbnails page).
This site's average load time is 1.6 seconds.
So, ask yourself if speed matters when you are choosing your web designer. |
