@kins Diet for Web Pages!

Do your visitors have to wait an age before they can view any of the content on your site? The problem is most people won’t “wait an age”, they will simply click off your site and if you are trying to run a business then this can be disastrous! Good web design is a balancing act between content rich, graphically pleasing sites and loading times.

As internet connections get faster we cannot become complacent and think that we can stop worrying about loading times, because people will expect loading times to be even quicker as they upgrade their internet connection and may click off your site after a shorter than usual period of waiting.

“I recommend putting your site on the @kins Diet!”

Okay, so we have established how important a quick loading site is, but how can we shorten lengthy loading times. Well, I recommend putting your site on the @kins Diet! Remove all the excess; lengthy video clips, background music and unnecessarily bulky images.

As with any good diet, you shouldn’t go cold turkey and omit all these things - just as our body needs a range of nutrients, a good web page needs a range of media. Long pages of endless text may load quickly, but they don’t exactly speak good web design.

“Communicate with your visitors!”

Another rule of the @kins diet is that you should spread out the media in your site, don’t eat all your junk food ration in one day i.e. don’t put all the largest images on one page and if you do feel like you need to do this, then don’t, again DO NOT, put all these files on the index page. Put them in a gallery page (Top Tip: use thumbnail images in galleries), that has a warning of lengthy loading times. Communicate with your visitors! The reason most click off is because they think that there is something wrong with the page, or worse, their computer! You can save them and you so much trouble by just leaving them a little note saying something like, “Please wait. Images Loading… Thank you.” on the page that is loading. Or a rollover advice text that tells them that the page they are about to click on has a lengthy loading time.

“cut the bulky images into smaller chunks”

Sites with loads of images are the ones that tend to take longest to load. The Bigger the imager, the longer it takes to load the image. Solution: reduce the size of the image. This isn’t always possible, I understand that. There are other ways, try slicing the image. For those of you that don’t know, this is like eating little and often, rather than having heavy meals - cut the bulky images into smaller chunks and then place them back together. This will definitely aid loading times and as parts of the image will be seen by the viewer, they will at least know something is happening.

Also look at the format of the images, .bmp images will take longer to load than .jpg or .gif - These are like diet foods, which don’t always taste as good as the original. The same sort of thing applies here, unless you use a good image editor then the quality of the image can be degraded on conversion.

Okay, so in summary the @kins diet recommends smaller images, rather than larger ones. When you definitely need to have a larger image, break it down into more manageable chunks and format it correctly. Most importantly of all, cut out the useless content that adds nothing to your design overall!




Thomas Jenkins of www.JKomp.com