Samuel Richardson wrote:
What is considered an acceptable total page size for the web these
days? Clearly the smaller the better but I’ve put together a fairly
graphic heavy travel website with a homepage size of about 300k.
With GZIP switched on in the server I imagine that this will be
reduced fairly substantially (we have some huge stylesheets that
will compress well).
Three things to remember:
1) There are still a large number of people accessing the Internet via
modems - not everyone has a broadband connection.
2) There is an increasing number of people accessing the Internet via
wireless devices which, like modems, can be incredibly slow.
3) Only serve gzip'd content if the requesting user agent says that it
can handle it, through the accept headers. (And for how long are we
going to use that ancient compression algorithm, when we have bzip2?)
If this is a travel Web site for travellers on the road, and if you
cannot avoid being "graphic heavy", you may wish to consider offering an
alternative, fast, version for mobile users and those accessing the
Internet through public terminals in out-of-the-way places, with slow
connections. I would say that the front page of the site should be as
light (minimum download sizes) as possible, so that you are catering for
all users; content elsewhere on the site can be media-rich for users
with high-speed connections, who can choose to view this rather than
forcing "heavy" content on all users.
Should you have, or have access to, a mobile phone with a Web browser (I
mean "real" Web, rather than WAP), this will give you first-hand
experience of what it is like, not only to have a slow connection, but a
small screen.
Cheers
M
--
Matthew Smith
IT Consultancy & Web Application Development
Business: http://www.kbc.net.au/
Personal: http://www.smiffysplace.com/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/smiffy
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