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Bigmouthmedia On Board
Bigmouthmedia, the award-winning Search Engine Marketing company, has been selected to drive internet traffic to the National Express website. In an ever-increasing online marketplace, National Express hope to capture their share of the potential...
Bigmouthmedia wins ‘Best Use of Search’ award.
Leading search engine optimisation agency bigmouthmedia has just announced its acceptance of the ‘Best Use of Search’ award in the prestigious 2005 Imperatives Digital Awards. This award was especially gratifying to the company as it included an...
Making Better Web Graphics that grab your attention and load FAST.
AG Graphics Making Better Web Graphics that grab your attention and load FAST. Volume 1, Issue 1 October 1, 2004 You are subscribed to - Making Better Web Graphics that grab your attention and load FAST. If you wish to be removed, you can find...
Music Cellular Phone Ringtones
Ring tones represent an ability to customize the cellular phone experience, and customers are buying them. The worldwide market for ring tones topped $2.5 billion in 2004, very little of which was spent in the United States, where sales amounted to...
Using QuickSub to make it easier for your visitors to subscribe to your feed
You can make it easier for your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. With a free and easy to install javascript function you can add the QuickSub feed button to your webpage in just a few minutes. Let me show you just how easy it is. ...
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Size Matters, It's True what they say!
Yes, it really does and the smaller your webpage the better it
is.
Size is an area where people can lose focus when they are
concentrating on the look and branding of their website.
In print and other forms of media, size and complexity of images
is not necessarily related to the viability of the advertising
itself.
But in the ether of the Internet, the time for a page to load is
incredibly important to the chances of it being viewed.
Soon, when Broadband is everywhere, the threshold of what is
considered allowable will increase, but till that time, size
will be a very important factor.
8 seconds is all you have got.
You need to grab the visitor by the horns, tell them they need
what you have got and give it to them! There is no time to stuff
around impressing them with your "wizzy this" and "wazzy that"
If your site is there to sell something, then that is what you
need to focus on.
People talk about "Content being king" and this is very true. If
your content is text, then you get a lot of bang for your buck,
if it is rich media like photos, video, and audio then you may
need to be a little clever in the way you present this so as to
not push people away purely because of the time they had to wait
to see it.
On a dialup connection, 8 seconds gets you about 30 kb, that is
usually enough for a few pictures and some text. If you are
clever enough about it, you can make it work for you.
Here are some ideas to think about when you are looking to
reduce the size of your pages.
· Use an image optimizer. It is surprising to see how many
images are far larger than they need to be. This is often due to
the fact that some software provide the ability to resize
pictures, but do not actually change the file size or download
time. The time taken to create thumbnails is well worth it in
the long run.
· Choose the right format for your images. JPG and GIF are the
two usual suspects for formatting images. JPG's are great for
photos and places with gradients. While GIF's are ideal for
cartoon style line graphics and logos.
· Use text wherever possible, while a picture may say a thousand
words, if you only need ten, do it with words.
· Rollovers - those cool looking menus where they change
appearance when you move your mouse over them. So, for ten menu
items, you are actually loading twenty pictures...it really adds
up.
· Use CSS, Cascading Style Sheets are a great tool for reducing
the time to load a page. Instead of formatting each piece of
text explicitly, using style sheets you can use style names
instead which are much shorter and take less space.
· Don't use FrontPage...OK this might be a gross
Cranky Flight Attendant Can't Have His Job Back
JetBlue Airways says that there will be no second exits for famed flight attendant Steven Slater -- who captured the nation's imagination with his profanity-laced loudspeaker tirade and jump down a plane's emergency chute, beer in hand.
Jokes To Tell Your Parents For Rosh Hashana
When Sam Hoffman and Eric Spiegelman's video of Hoffman's 60-something mother telling an off-color joke on YouTube went viral, they knew they had something special. The success of their subsequent website, OldJewsTellingJokes.com, and their upcoming book have proved them right.
Hopelessly Devoted To A Challenge
You are given a five-letter word and a seven-letter word. Rearrange the letters of one of the words to get a synonym of the other word. For example, given "alloy" and "devoted," the answer would be "loyal."
generalisation,
but the number of FrontPage sites I have had to rescue and the
time taken to do it shows there are much better things out there
that produce much better pages.
· Check it out for yourself - use any of the good tools out
there to test the speed of your page (just remember, their time
are from their server to your site and not necessarily from
where you are). Do a search on "web page optimization".
So with your current 8-second window, you have to get your
message across. These things I have mentioned will all help in
the fight against the bloated page, but you need to be vigilant
to make sure that you can achieve the look you want within the
time you have.
Your Audience
The audience is also vital to this calculation. Some audiences
will happily wait to see the frilly bits float across the screen
or the Flash intro load.
Especially in visual arts such as Museums, Art Galleries, Movies
and Games, these extras are an expectation of the audience. They
want you to wow them and that if you don't they will go on to
the next cab off the rank.
But if your business is a little more ordinary, then time is of
the essence. Consider how many other place of business there are
out there like yours? Maybe not exactly the same, as yours is
special, but similar enough to the web surfer where if you can't
deliver what they want in the shortest time possible, they will
move on.
The browsers "BACK" button is your enemy. The more people click
this once they land on your site, the less effective your site
is being.
One good thing to look for is the time people spend on your
site. If you use AWstats (a free webstats program) it will show
you the percentage of people leaving after different durations.
If you have a high percentage of people leaving in the 0-30
seconds column, you may need to look at that page and see what
is happening. Possibly, they just couldn't wait long enough.
While on the subject of Webstats, Google Analytics gives
some great information about your visitors activities on your
website. While you may not be able to sign up yet (at the time
of writing, the signups had been temporarily disabled), keep an
eye on it as it will be of great use to all webmasters and
website owners to keep a good eye on their prized internet
possession.
So keep it short and sweet, it is how you use it that matters!
About the author:
Steven Gardner runs DeepWeb
Web Design, a web design business that caters to all
businesses looking to get an edge with their presence on the
Web, providing web design, maintenance and consulting services.
You can find him at www.deepweb.co.nz
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