Website design and the slow lane

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

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.

Actually, my post was more intended to offer a solution to a different ISP. In this day and age, if you absolutely cannot use DSL or Cable, Net Zero offers unlimited internet access for $10 a month. Dakotah commented how his "internet provider nicks us for some time with 24kbps service for downloading too much bandwidth." In this day and age, that's completely unacceptable.

[Drew Bedo]

I'd say its a case of....You gotta dance with who you brought to the dance....If you go to a rural area, be it Provonce(sp?) or Montana, you expect to find limitations as well as attraxctions: High-Speed Broad band vs scented breezez and sunsets.

Some websites have a button that links to a text only verson of the site. Is that an option here on lfphoto?

[Brian Vuillemenot]

Wow, you actually have dial-up?!? I'm envious- I have a hamster in a wheel that's powering my modem!

[John T]

I just read in the paper today that 9% of internet users use dial-up. Some do it because it is cheap and some because, they have no choice. Having spent several years in South Dakota I have quite a few friends who still only have dial up.

However, designing for dial up will probably reduce traffic to your site since most people are used to a fancier (not necessarily crazy fancy) website.

I'm currently designing my website and am breaking it up into three parallel units: the primary website-designed to incorporate my presentation concept; a second site with the images, but in a basic format (for dial-up users and those who don't like creative presentations) and for small screens (phones and ipod touch). This is a ton of work, and upkeep should be a pain.

[Kuzano]

New infrastructure is on the way. Much discussion about the existing internet being too kludged up to fix. One of the reasons I don't do too much with it.... no web site or any marketing reliance. The replacement is going to be far more restricted, and far better.

One of the players here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...linesupplement

Do a little search using the words.... the new internet

Predictions of the "failure" of the internet are mythical... replacement??? now that's another story.

[D. Bryant]

New infrastructure is on the way. Much discussion about the existing internet being too kludged up to fix. One of the reasons I don't do too much with it.... no web site or any marketing reliance. The replacement is going to be far more restricted, and far better.

One of the players here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...linesupplement

Do a little search using the words.... the new internet

Predictions of the "failure" of the internet are mythical... replacement??? now that's another story.

Hmmm, the date on that story is from Nov. 2001. Guess things aren't moving as fast as they anticipated.

[Stephen Lewis]

Hi Guys

Having a limited knowledge of HTML etc, my website design is, by default, simple. However, I have made a few decisions with speed-challanged connections in mind. For example I keep the largest images below 100kb, do not use fancy fonts and try not to use flash (with the exeption of the front page!). It is alsp designed with 1024 x 768 displays in mind.
Not a huge amount of help granted, but if visitors have to wait for pages to download they're more likely to move on. HTH

Steve
www.landscapesofwales.co.uk

[Dennis]

I am one of the 9% still on dial up. My connection is usually just over 50,000 bps. For the most part I have no problem but then I don't care to down load movies or music. I use Safari but what I liked about Explorer was that you could load individual images and keep most of them unloaded.

I always make sure any image I post on the web is "saved for web" and a small file. When someone starts making a habit of sending me large images in email I tell them not to. I first go to web mail to check email rather than let mac mail do it because I delete anything that is large an unnecessary before trying to down load it.

I built my web site with Dreamweaver and am currently rebuilding it. I keep it simple with only small images, text and links. It must be very quick to browse for the other 91%.
Dennis
Oh, I do dial up because I have to save all my pennies for film.

[Ben Syverson]

You can still have good design and best practices.

Here is a site I designed that features large photos, and rollovers for navigation. There's no Javascript, and it works in every browser I've tested from Lynx up. Best of all, the entire site (that includes all of the images and all of the pages) takes up about 2 megabytes. Each individual page is tiny.

It's not hard if you know what you're doing...

[PenGun]

You can still have good design and best practices.

Here is a site I designed that features large photos, and rollovers for navigation. There's no Javascript, and it works in every browser I've tested from Lynx up. Best of all, the entire site (that includes all of the images and all of the pages) takes up about 2 megabytes. Each individual page is tiny.

It's not hard if you know what you're doing...

Hmmm. This is in your source.

<----------- snip ------------>

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-3994862-2");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

<---------------------- snip --------------------->

Not that it does much in my browser . Nicely done.