tedster - 3:35 pm on Mar 29, 2001 (gmt 0)

>> when I come across a good-looking, fast-loading site at home, I am super-duper *extra* immpressed.

That's the main point. Keep the page weight down and you've given your site an advantage.

Many of the competitors for my clients ignore this, and they're giving our sites an advantage that they don't need to. I'm not complaining! In fact, I hope they continue to offer pages that take 30 seconds or more to load.

There are many factors which can slow down page loading besides file size: calling cookie info from a slow database, net congestion, server overload (especially a problem when a page calls from various servers -- it seems like one of them is almost guaranteed to be slow). Given this, it's very important to optimize the total page weight. Every kb you save may help to bring in many more prospects over time.

Even if people are growing more willing to wait, that's still no license to the devloper and designer to take great liberties with file size. A lot of the slow pages look to me like no effort was made to optimize at all.

The web is a medium with bandwidth limitations, and these will be with us for a while. A designer who doesn't take the time to learn about the medium is not a good designer, they are self-indulgent. It's rare that the "artistic effect" is worth the wait.

Edited by: tedster