I have received a lot of positive feedback on the websites that I create, but one of the most consistent things I hear is that my sites load so quickly. In an era of broadband connections, fancy imagery programs and designers trying to provide eye candy over form, this is something that is not getting the attention is deserves.
This article will just be a quick overview, but I will go indepth each topic at a later date.
If someone comes to your site and it doesn't load in a few seconds, they will go on to the next site. A lot of people will ask me to build flash intros to their website. Every time, I ask them why. I always get the same response...It looks impressive. If it doesn't provide a function to your customers, it won't add to your site. Same thing with making your website to image heavy. Images take up more bandwidth than text. Use them sparingly. There are many tricks. The old standard was to save images at 72 dpi (dots per inch). Newer monitors are set at 96 dpi. What does that mean to you? If you are putting a photograph on your website, you will need to use an image optimizing software to degrade the DPI. Why? Two reasons...The extra dpi in a standard digital camera will be wasted on your website, because your monitor can't display it. Also, the extra DPIs bloat the filesize and it takes much longer for the photo to load.
Yes, a lot of people do have blazing fast connections nowadays, but what about your target audience? Maybe your typical customers do not have high speed internet. How do you still create an attractive website that still loads quickly enough? The old standard was to have the site load in 8 seconds or less in a 56k modem speed setting. With today's innovatiions, that is a difficult target to reach, but we should try to get as close as possible. A great tool for determining how quickly your page will load is: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze. This tool will tell you how quickly your page will load.
So, to summarize, try to use images sparingly, optimize the images to 96 DPI, when you do use them and test your loading time!