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walrus
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/6/2003 16:41:48
quote:
I' ve been reading a lot lot of posts in this forum (especially site critique)and have come to the conclusion that a web page shouldn' t be more than 60k. Is this a fair assumption?
No
The faster a site loads the better (true) but more important is whether, after having waited, it is a site worth returning to, or proceeding any further.
Why don' t you post your site in the critique forum and maybe someone will suggest ways to " economise" content for speed, or vice versa.
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Gil
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/6/2003 16:57:28
quote:
I' ve been reading a lot lot of posts in this forum (especially site critique)and have come to the conclusion that a web page shouldn' t be more than 60k. Is this a fair assumption?
I don' t know where that figure (60K) came from, but it' s not really realistic - I think anything under 100K is fine.
.02
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Nancy
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/6/2003 17:15:26
I don' t know that I am the only one, but I know I have mentioned 60k.
In order to give visitors a quick loading site, I think 10 seconds is considered ideal, and a 100k page will not usually load in 10 seconds.
I agree, at a maximum 100k should be acceptable, but if at all possible the index page should focus on drawing visitors in with good content, and once they have decided to visit more of your site, you can usually get away with a little larger page size.
Hope that made some sense. *S*
If you' re using the load time showing in FrontPage, keep in mind that it usually isn' t very accurate.
Posting your site in the critiques section is a good way to get some ideas on what might help.
Nancy
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Gil
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/6/2003 17:29:47
quote:
know I' ve mentioned 60K too but then I' m also a parrot.
LOL...
Mike & Nancy, I wasn' t saying 60K was wrong - heck, the smaller the better[:p] I normally try, as Nancy said, to keep the index page down below 100K close to 75K. And while there are still some out there with slow dialups (John?), high speed conections are getting more & more available, making it less of an issue...
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Nancy
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/6/2003 17:41:25
I just figure it is easier to shoot for 60k and end up being a little over than it is to shoot for 100k and try to whittle it down.
A lot of times, organization of a site will help with the load time. Images can only be optimized so much, so putting them on interior pages can help with the initial load time. Visitors are much more tolerant once they see a site has information they are looking for.
Nancy
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john40004
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From: Bardstown KY USA
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/6/2003 20:50:19
Hi Josh,
A few words from The Turtle. Tonight I' m on a 25.8 kbps. 
quote:
A lot of times, organization of a site will help with the load time. Images can only be optimized so much, so putting them on interior pages can help with the initial load time. Visitors are much more tolerant once they see a site has information they are looking for.
Josh, a really great comment here by Nancy. I' ve looked at many sites here, and have seen many others on the Internet, which simply were developed well and loaded extremely fast at my connection speeds. Lets assume you agree with Gil (comment below), do you still want to squander your bandwidth? Its hard to develop a lean site, I' m certainly not there with my personal one  , but do you take the easy way out or continue to learn? Everytime I learn something new here and knock a second or so off the download time on my site, its a major victory for me - and my visitors.
quote:
And while there are still some out there with slow dialups (John?), high speed conections are getting more & more available, making it less of an issue...
I have to disagree here Gil. High speed connections are getting more common, but there is still a large portion of the Internet viewing audience without them. To simply ignore us is to both isolate a large market, with dollars to spend and also leave your client paying the bandwidth charges for bloated code. We' re not " less of an issue" yet. Rural American, unsure as to the rest of the globe, still relies on dial-ups to a large degree. We were also the ones which caused the boom in satellite dishes since we were unable to receive T.V. signals in the past - some areas still cannot due so. You wounded me deeply Sir by saying I' m becoming " less of an issue" ! I' m lean, mean and a fighting machine! (Cough! Gasp! Dear God that hurts! Where' s nowlkldy, I need an ambulance!   [:p])
Josh, post your site in the Site Critiques. There' s a nice bunch of folks here. No one will make fun of the site or jump on you. You' ll find a lot of help available.
John
P.S.
Just don' t use frames or flash! Sorry Old Hippy - I had to say it!!!!!!! [:p][:p][:p][:p][:p]
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Gil
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/6/2003 23:25:22
quote:
Just don' t use frames or flash! Sorry Old Hippy - I had to say it!!!!!!!
LOL - John, you never have to say you' re sorry to me - you' ve added far too much to these discussions to ever apologize!
I never intended to imply " To simply ignore us is to both isolate a large market" , and am sure I never said that. My point (you gotta remember my background is from the marketing world - I' d never agree to ignoring a viable market segment) is that those with " slow" connections are not living in a dream world - they know thier connection is slow and as such expect sites to take longer to load. Now, I don' t mean that as an excuse to build bloated, slow sites. Only that the 60K limit suggested earlier is unrealistic and not a reasonable goal. Someone suggested shooting for 60K and staying under 100K - well, my mind doesn' t work that way - if I set a limit of 100K, 101K is too large and doesn' t get published*. In the end it comes down to the developers choice - keep it clean and simple and fast or clean, some what simple and " fast enough" or loaded with junk and slow. I personaly go somewhere between fast and fast enough. I feel Flash and Frames have done more harm to and set back the WWW more than anything!
* The only time I' ve ever failed a test in a computer class was we were told to write a 1K file for a class once - the professor failed anyone whose file was less than 1023 bytes or larger than 1025 bytes!
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john40004
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/7/2003 0:13:58
Hi Gil,
Thanks for the clarification! I miss-read your post. This from someone who explained tonight to Bill Nichol my post as to Mike54! Warning to Mike54[:j]
As to " Flash" , just your thoughts? With my connection speed, it simply drags my download to a crawl. Without exaggeration, I can take a bathroom break or have a cup of coffee while the page loads. All I see are these little green bars loading on the computer. On the other-hand, my personal feeling is that the Internet is trying to, and also approaching, what is seen on T.V. The graphics, the commercials, etc. To some extent, your comments as to my connection speed are justified here in that I cannot keep up with the download. What are you concerns as to Flash?
Josh - I told you this was a great place to learn! 
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caywind
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/7/2003 2:53:37
I actually have a book here that says ...
37- 47k
where they got that number from ???
recent too...
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Nancy
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/7/2003 3:06:35
Here' s an interesting article on the subject of connection speeds, visitor' s williness to wait, etc.
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/res_load.htm
Some information is older, but one stat I noticed (from the end of 2002) is that only 30% of users from home have any type of broadband connection in the USA.
There' s a chart showing page size and visitor' s willingness to wait, and after looking at that chart, I think my 60k is sounding a little high for total file size. :(
Nancy
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Josh
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/7/2003 3:11:10
Well, I' m pleased to see that this post has brought everyone a little closer! Thanks for all the input! It sounds as though there isn' t one best answer to my question, which is what I was kind of hoping for. On one hand I could have a fast loading web pages with lower quality graphics, such as my company logo, and pictures, but on the other I could sacrafice loading time and have higher quality pages. Which, in essence is what one would want for their web site. What I mean is, by sacraficing time, I can put together a more professional site. And obviously it will be interesting enough to capture the users eye and fulfill there needs so they will come back when they would ever need my services again. That' s everyones goal when designing a site...right?! As long as I keep my index.htm under 100k I' ll be o.k.?! Oh, also am curious as to how close to accurate the load times are that FP gives you? I' m actually using dreamweaver this time to build my site, but I assume the answer to that question would apply to any web page builder.
I will be sure to post my site into the critique area when I' m further along, right now I' m just in the beginning stages and didn' t want to get too far and have to start over because load times were out of control.
Thanks again for everyone' s contribution.
Josh
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pageoneresults
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/7/2003 14:20:59
Lots of good feeback in this thread. Spooky brings up one of the most important points and that is tables. If your pages are enclosed in one table and then you' ve nested tables within that main table, the browser needs to interpret everything within the main encompassing table before it renders the page. I' ve seen some sites that had very little content, but the table structure was so obscene that the page took forever to load.
There are many ways to approach the page size issue. Spooky mentions one of them as many others do in this thread. Another is working with external css and javascript. Many of you have the little bells and whistles that add functionality to a site. They also add a lot of page weight. Believe it or not, those bells and whistles are not doing that much for your site visitors experience unless of course your industry dictates it. For example, if you are a Flash developer, you are going to have Flash elements on a page.
Since I work strictly with css and absolute positioning, page weight is not an issue. I am able to present the user with the content first while the graphics are loading in the background. People are usually at your site for one thing, information or to purchase a product and/or service. Give them what they came for and let the graphics and other elements load while they are reading.
Another factor to consider in page weight, is the text to html ratio. If your pages have a ratio of less than 10%, you may have content issues to deal with. [url=" http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/page_size.cgi" ]Check your text to html ratio[/url].
I would recommend that pages do not cross the 100k mark. If they do, anything after the 100k may not get indexed. Google has clearly stated that they will not index anything after 100k on a page. For those of you who have 100k of html code (markup) before your content, you will never be found in Google or other search engines for that matter.
Unfortunately many FP users are guilty of html code bloat. It is not their fault, but more the fault of FP and the whole WYSIWYG interface. Until you understand the basics of html and which features to use and not to use in FP, you will have code bloat. FP themes and navigation are at the top of the list for generating an excess of html code bloat. I hate to say that, but it is very true. I' ve never used either of those features in FP and highly recommend that you find alternatives to using them once your skills with html become more tuned.
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Mike_R
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/8/2003 13:12:53
Pageone, you made some comments that I have questions about. I am battling page size issues on a site I' m developing and will do anything to speed loading time. Part of my problem is that I have many images on each page. I have used Photoshop to optimize them for the web, but I may need to take some of my larger pages and divide them into several smaller ones.
Anyway, you said css and absolute positioning reduce page weight. I think I understand how css does this, but I don' t understand about absolute postioning. Can you expand on that idea?
Thanks,
Mike R
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pageoneresults
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From: Orange, CA USA
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/8/2003 14:06:40
quote:
Can you expand on that idea?
Hello Mike_R, actually, my statement was...
quote:
Since I work strictly with css and absolute positioning, page weight is not an issue.
The css is pretty much self explanatory. I' ve removed all presentational markup and now use external css, one file controlling every page of the web site. I' ve got some sites with over 300 pages.
In regards to absolute positioning, I am able to position my content right after the opening <body> tag. My html might look like this...
<body>
<div>
<h1>Heading</h1>
<p>Opening paragraph</p>
<ul>
<li>Some list items</li>
</ul>
<p>Another paragraph</p>
<ol>
<li>Some ordered list items</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div><include>Footer</div>
<div><include>Left navigation</div>
<div><include>Top navigation</div>
</body>
I' ve trimmed out some of the code just for ease of discussion. Notice that I use mostly <div>s in my coding. I only use tables where necessary (tabular data). The browser still needs to render the <div>s just as it does with <table>s. But, you' ll notice that my core content (what the visitor sees) is right up there after the <body> tag.
Browsers render pages from left to right, top to bottom. Since I am absolutely positioning major elements on my page like top nav, left nav and my core content, I am able to present the browser (and indexing spider) with my core content first. This means that when the visitor hits that page, they see content first while the rest of what is below the content is being rendered by the browser.
Take a look at our SEO Consultants Directory. On a really slow connection, you will probably see a tiling page background across the top of the page and then the visible content (text) first. Then you' ll notice that other elements start to appear on the screen. This is the browser rendering the page from left to right, top to bottom. It has already read our style sheet because it is externally linked from the <head> section. Anything within the <head> is rendered prior to anything after the <body>.
When you are using <table>s and standard web page layout, there is usally a fair amount of markup code that appears right after the <body> tag. This code has to be rendered first by the browser before it gets to your opening <p> tag. If there are a lot of nested tables, this could take a little bit of time on a 56k modem connection leaving the visitor to wait while the presentational elements are being loaded, hence the page weight issue.
In reference to your images, Photoshop is an excellent program. But, I' ve found that if you do not fully understand how to use it for optimizing images for the web, you may not be fully optimizing them. The default setting in Photoshop for .jpg is a quality of 99. Way too much for the web and 72 dpi monitor resolutions. I use a program called Fireworks for optimizing images for the web. Most of my .jpgs are set at quality levels of 80 or below depending on the subject matter.
For example, a quality 99 setting from Photoshop might produce an image that is 26k in size. If you reduce that quality setting to 80, the size may be 14k. Big difference and no loss in image quality. Once you get below the quality of 80, then you will start to see degradation of the image (depending on the subject matter in the image).
If your pages are close to the 100k mark, or even the 60k mark, you may want to consider breaking the pages into smaller more compact ones. If your images are making up more than 50% of your pages size, then you may want to consider maximizing or optimizing them further to reduce their file size.
< Message edited by pageoneresults -- 5/8/2003 2:11 PM >
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Mike_R
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/8/2003 14:36:34
Very good advice, Pageone. Thank you so much. As soon as I get some free time, I' m going to experiment with both css and absolute positioning. I will also take a look at some of my images. I think you are right. Some may need further optimizing.
Mike R
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pageoneresults
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RE: Does Size Matter?? - 5/8/2003 14:52:30
Thanks Mike_R! Let me expand on the absolute positioning a little more as some may not fully understand the concept, it took me a while too!
Let' s say that I have a FP include that contains my top navigation. Since most of my top navigation elements are rich in graphics, I don' t want the browser chewing on those first.
With absolute positioning and css, I can now place my FP webbot include anywhere I wish within the html. My css might look like this for the top nav include...
div.top-nav{position:absolute;top:0px;left:0px;}
div.image-1{position:absolute;top:0px;left:20px;}
div.image-2{position:absolute;top:0px;left:100px;}
My html might look like this...
<div class=" top-nav>
<div class=" image-1><img src...></div>
<div class=" image-2><img src...></div>
</div>
Remember, the browser renders everything from left to right, top to bottom. Since I have an external css file in the <head> section, the browser references that file first (before rendering the page) which contains all of the positioning coordinates for my elements. It doesn' t care where I place the html for those elements because they are absolutely positioned through the css.
I can now place that <div class=" top-nav" > wherever I want to within my html. Since it contains images and other non important information for the spiders/robots, I want to place that as far down in my html as possible, as close to that closing </body> tag that I can.
To see this in action, view the source code of our SEO Consultants Directory and you' ll see what I mean. In typical web page design using tables, those elements will appear right after the <body> tag. Why? because the browser reads and renders from left to right, top to bottom. Once you absolutely position something, the browser obeys the positioning coordinates that you specify.
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