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!