|
Are slow pages a bad thing? Surprisingly the answer is “not always”. Sometimes it’s all right to a have a page that takes a while to download. Sometimes (and usually) it’s not. The visitor to your website wants to get to the information/entertainment/service etc. on your website as quickly and easily as possible. So the time taken, and difficulty getting there, should be as little as possible. To this end, make the navigation clear, and make the download times for pages between where they are now, and where they want to be as quick as possible. On this basis download times should be minimised and pages kept relatively small and simple. However, once they are at their "destination" page, it might be all right for that page to be larger and slower to download. Take the following scenario. A radio station’s website has details of pop groups, and pop idols. Visitors to the site browse the site looking for information and pictures of their own particular favourite. When they find the page with pictures to download, they’d like large, hi definition pictures to download as wallpaper, not small postage stamp sized images. The larger pictures increase the size of the pages as a whole, and therefore increase the time to download. In this case the destination page is the one with the nice pictures of their pop idol. Here it's OK to have the larger/slower page because the visitor is there to download a reasonably sized image, so would be happy to wait a little longer.
|
