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Thread: Website design and the slow lane

  1. #1

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    Website design and the slow lane

    In a current thread about a website of photographs of holocaust survivors, Dakota Jackson complained that the site is essentially inaccessible for people, like him, on dial-up.

    In response, someone essentially asked, incredulously, whether he was using dial-up by force of circumstance or luddite choice.

    Seeing as how I now spend several months a year in a dial-up only community, I have some sympathy for Dakota's frustration.

    For me, the solution is to tell my browser, by default, not to render images. If I really want to see a site's images, I override this once I'm in the site. Then I go make coffee, because the images don't exactly load lickety-split.

    So some questions...

    How many of us are stuck back in the dark ages?

    What strategies do people stuck with medeival technology use to surf the modern web?

    Do those of you with speed and bandwidth to spare give a hoot, when you are designing your sites, about those of us who live in a time warp?

    Are you designing your sites with smartphones, which are also in some respects a tad primitive, in mind?

    Cheers

    P.S. This summer, the community a few miles up the coast from me is getting high speed. I figure that the community library is going to see a serious boom in business from those of us that the cable company did not favour.

  2. #2

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    Re: Website design and the slow lane

    r.e., I certainly relate to that. I waited three years for DSL phone. Now, having had that for a year, I want faster. Go figure. It took a lot of selling to talk the spouse into DSL. Now, I could never go back. I do not see any sites developed with a slight consideration for dialup. Everything is T1 or is it T2..

  3. #3

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    Re: Website design and the slow lane

    I used to spend three months during the summer in a remote village in France with no chance of any highspeed internet. Even dial-up was at the best 30K or so - it was slooooooow. During those three months I would only check email - and even that would take forever! I totally sympathize with folks who have to put up with this all year long. For those of us being used to cable modems, we cannot imagine what it means to watch a website build up line by line on your monitor - you just want to grab that damn monitor and shake it to make it go faster.
    Juergen

  4. #4

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    Re: Website design and the slow lane

    Juergen,

    But of course living in rural France has its compensations. Ou? Bretagne, Auvergne?

  5. #5
    Whatever David A. Goldfarb's Avatar
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    Re: Website design and the slow lane

    I started my academic website in 1992, and since I work on Eastern Europe where a lot of academics didn't have internet access at that time, and most of my academic stuff is text, I made it so it would be readable in Lynx without frames or tables for the most part, and all the images had ALT tags. I've stuck to that in that site, so it looks a bit old fashioned, but it gets everything across that I need to communicate. It's still navigable in Lynx, if you can find a UNIX server running Lynx.

    My photo website is about images with little text (I'm thinking of adding an articles section at some point), so there are images and frames but no Flash or Java. I'm thinking I'd like to clean up the lines a bit, and I should put in larger images, since larger screens are more and more common, and I generally should update the content more often, but I'm trying to keep it simple.

  6. #6

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    Re: Website design and the slow lane

    Quote Originally Posted by David A. Goldfarb View Post
    ...larger screens are more and more common
    Is that true?

    I keep reading stuff about the demise of the desktop in favour of laptops, which strikes me, only anecdotally from speaking with friends, as a genuine trend. Of course, it is consistent to hook up a big monitor to a laptop.

    But meanwhile, more and more people seem to be using smartphones on the net, indeed I am writing this on a Blackberry, and a friend just showed me his new mini-computer, which seems to be the coming thing.

    There's lots of discussion on the web about making sites smartphone compatible; e.g. on alistapart.com

    Cheers

  7. #7

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    Re: Website design and the slow lane

    r.e. yes, I must admit that I did not miss the Internet too much during those three months:-) Our place was in a village called Theoule sur Mer in the Alpes/Maritimes region of Southern France, We loved our place, but after being robbed three times while we were in the house - we just had enough. Crime has gotten so bad in that part of France that we finally gave up and sold the place.
    Juergen

  8. #8

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    Re: Website design and the slow lane

    I don't know, but when I started Web design, we worked with Mosaic and Lynx. I used a dial-up until just over a year ago when the phone company installed DSL in the area. I'm happy with it. It's about my speed, and I design my own Website with DSL in mind. At some point you have to jettison older technology despite that some people still use it, but you shouldn't design for the latest technology assuming everyone is like you. It's a great way to lose return visitors.
    --Scott--

    Scott M. Knowles, MS-Geography
    scott@wsrphoto.com

    "All things merge into one, and a river flows through it."
    - Norman MacLean

  9. #9

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    Re: Website design and the slow lane

    Juergen,

    Ahh, that part of France.

    First there was Graham Greene's J'Accuse, for which he was roundly and wrongly condemned, and then there was Bernard Tapie

    Myself, I spent about four months living in Nice, and lived to tell the tale.

    But the film The French Connection was pretty close to the mark

  10. #10
    Whatever David A. Goldfarb's Avatar
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    Re: Website design and the slow lane

    Good point about phones, PDAs and such.

    Even on laptops, though, the 800x600 pixel screen that I originally designed my photo website for isn't so common anymore. The small screens like the one on my wife's little 3-year-old 11" Vaio are often 96 ppi, while the old standard was 72 ppi, so it's still 1260x768.

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