The blog

On the Importance of Bandwidth

When building your website, it is always important to be mindful about download speed. Yes, you may have a blazing-fast internet connection, but your next customer may not.

Your website should always be as lean as possible and never take for granted that your visitors will have the luxury of a high-speed internet connection.  While many people are shifting away from dial-up connections, DSL and cable speeds are not always the fastest, especially in the U.S.

Just today, Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about such issue: neglecting page speed will not only hurt your visitors’ experience, it seems to be that Google may even start lowering your rank too.

As these bandwidth-luxuriant (and not always beautiful, needed, or useful) practices became commonplace on mainstream sites, many advanced, standards-focused web designers were experimenting with web fonts, CSS3 multiple backgrounds, full-page background images, and other devices to create semantic, structurally lean sites that were as rich (and heavy) as Flash sites.

There are several ways to trim down the size of your pages while keeping aesthetics. Just ensure you are using bytes the right way and not in some meaningless, useless way. It may make sense to present your audience with high-definition images of your products (let the user decide when to get them, and if you can, please warn them about it), but it may not make a lot of sense to use a heavily bloated page for a simple contact form.

Keep it lean!

And we are On!

For over the past ten years, I have been closely working with web browsers, markup, stylesheets, database-driven sites, static sites, intranet sites and internet sites.

It’s amazing how much the web has grown in the past ten or fifteen years.  Every day businesses and people alike are more than willing to start their online presence, whether is a small site, a blog, or a full-fledged site with a content management or publishing system.

Sadly, more often than not, these web sites are poorly designed and do not help their owners achieve their sites’ goals: better engine visibility, robust design that allows the site to grow, simple and flexible code that allows easy maintenance.  On top of that, site owners find out way later in the game that certain browsers on certain platforms don’t even display their site the way they always expected.

That’s our focus: Cross-browser and cross-platform design compatibility, lean, flexible, sustainable design — design that fosters the ability to use modern web technologies without the need to be more expensive, because it doesn’t have to.

links+pixels is committed to each and every one of their current and future customers to provide the best design and markup that will allow their sites to be standards compliant, highly visible to search engines, and tuned up for the best download performance.  We will also ensure that your site is appropriately displayed in all modern browsers so your don’t have to worry about your visitors’ computer or browser, we’ll take care of that.

This is a new and exciting adventure, and we are certain we’ll provide the best web design and development consulting services.

Take a look at our services and portfolio, then if you want a new site or either overhaul or revamp your existing one, give us a shout. We are here to help.

— Mau