The 50 KB rule 
A lot of web builders use their own fast computers and Internet connections as the standard to measure the speed of a site. As a consequence, the web pages they make are far too heavy and take ages to load on a regular PC with a regular modem connection. A lot of Internet professionals forget that, despite the popularity of broadband, 60% of all Belgian surfers still use an analogue modem. And that's without even mentioning the overloaded, slow company networks. In other words, if an analogue modem is still the most popular way of connecting to the Internet, make sure your pages are suited to that type of connection. Bearing in mind that the average user gets slightly annoyed after ten seconds of waiting and genuinely considers doing something else after twenty seconds of waiting, it is best to limit the page size to 50 KB. Naturally, this size limit is very important for the homepage, because that's the user's first contact with your web site and if that doesn't go well, chances are the user won't even bother to look at the other pages of your site. The 50 KB size limit is important for all pages of your site though: a page of 50 KB takes about ten to fifteen seconds to load via a regular modem connection and most users aren't willing to wait much longer.

How to keep your pages under 50 KB
Clean html code. A lot of web sites would already profit greatly from a cleaned up html code. This means a good use of tables, style sheets, java script, commentary et cetera.

Avoid unnecessary image files. A great way of downsizing a page is by leaving out all the unnecessary image files. A lot of sites use large visuals on the homepage because they think users find this attractive, forgetting that large images significantly slow down the downloading of a page.

No ads. A lot of corporate sites use flashy moving banners or buttons to advertise promotions on their site. Not only do users often ignore these moving elements because they see them for what they are - advertising - the buttons and banners add a lot of unnecessary weight to the page, making users wait longer for the page to download.

Use html whenever possible. The majority of sites could significantly reduce the page size by replacing all the text in image files by text in html. This will not only have a positive effect on the page size, it will also make the text easier to read and will make site building and maintenance cheaper and easier. Why so many sites insist on putting things like page titles or navigation in image files is anybody's guess. Html is a much more suitable format for text.

Els Aerts & Karl Gilis

A more in depth version of this article has appeared in Tips & Advies Online Ondernemen, year 6, number 4 (België en Nederland).