Why You Still Need to Be concerned with Bandwidth and Download Speeds
August 31st, 2007 by Michael Gray in ToolsIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
So after coming back from a vacation after SES I was reminded bandwidth and download speeds are still very much an issue.
The Thursday after SES San Jose we drove to Anaheim to visit the second happiest place on earth, Disneyland (shocking I know). While in Anaheim we planned a day trip to Catalina Island, where I was going to do a little scuba diving. Faced with the choice of getting as much client work out the door before I left, or planning/booking all of my travel plans, I chose to do the client work and book things on the go.
Since I’m paying $60 a month for my verizon card I don’t use the $10 a day hotel internet anymore. While Verizon is faster than dialup, broadband speed it ain’t. In fact big splashy graphics, flash, or audio files are torture to download. So when evaluating scuba tour sites, if the potential companies websites didn’t load (which was about half of them) they were eliminated from consideration. The person who got my business wasn’t the person with the fancy graphics or design with the most “sizzle”, it was one who had a website I could use.
What you don’t run a travel website so you think this doesn’t pertain to you? I’ve been in a cab with my crackberry addict blackberry wielding friend, looking for a restaurant and experienced the exact same problem with download times and flash. Am I suggesting that the web jump back to 1999? Not by any stretch of the imagination, what I’m saying is don’t build your website and only look at it from a broadband connection. Load it on a mobile device and see what happens, try it from a mobile hot spot or wireless laptop card. Try it on a smart phone, more and more people use them in fact some of my friends have more than one smart phone.
Don’t think of this as limitation, think of it as an opportunity you currently aren’t utilizing. Think of this as a market your competition isn’t going after. Think of it something you can do to get more traffic and customers. I’ve already seen people shopping on an iPhone and more are coming … trust me.
Sphere It
August 31st, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Download speeds will always be important. The speed has never really been compared to an absolute, but rather against other sites. If your site takes half a second to download, but everyone else’s takes a quarter of a second your site is slow and people will notice.
Until a site can load instantly as you finish clicking on a link download speeds will be important. And once they can load instantly on the click people will want pages to load in response to their thought of clicking on the link.
August 31st, 2007 at 7:15 pm
That’s funny as I read your post while on my Verizon card at the DMV. I’ve had exactly the same experience. It’s fantastic to have connectivity almost anywhere (it even worked on our fishing trip near the Yellowstone river in Montana), but I completely avoid graphic heavy websites when I’m on it.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Very true Michael,
I strongly suggest to my clients that they need to tweak the design to suit a slower internet connection and not just limit it to testing on broadband. There are some plugins available that will make WP blogs mobile compatible, have you checked it out? I have a list of the “working” ones on my blog.
I hope that the designers today keep this in mind while making those flashy designs.
Cheers!
Mani
September 1st, 2007 at 6:11 am
very appropriate tip, Michael. In addition to thinking through the whole download speed … perhaps better described as ‘time to first useful page” for the user, publishers should indeed consider slow as well as fast users as useful parts of their audience. A few sites, all too few, are smart enough to self-adjust. Anyone interested in doing their site smartly code add some code that would downlad something tiny, a small “into” part of the default first page, and “sniff” when the download is complete. If the initial download takes too long (in the designers viewpoint) then that “introductory snippet” becomes the default and the site proceeds in interaction using ultra-light text only pages. Google, for example uses this behavior on many of their services … if the D/L is taking too long the site still presents a usable “mobi-weight” version … else it proceeds to the “hevayweight” version. It’s all about giving the user what the usr needs rather than what the designer/publisher thinks they want.
Video should always been doethis way too … attempt to download a “mini” version and then redownoad the ‘cull Monty” is speed shows it is appropriate. It’s particularly annoying to see sites that waste the user’s time by asling “What speed is your connection?” and then selecting the D/L version based on the user’s answer. The site can determine that for itself and make the expereince better for both sides.