Forum Moderators: phranque
When I started in 1998, 14.4 and 28.8 was the most popular, and I was always carefull on the image sizes, usally keeping my product images below 20K max with 10-15K being prefered. This sometimes resulted in reduced quality, but hey load times were the most important.
Now I set my limits to 30K, and will go higher if I feel the quality will suffer.
I see in a few years, dial-up going the way of the do-do bird, and will not have to worry about image sizes (within reason).
Is the general feeling in the industry, that people want quality images, and the dial-up users have nobody to blame but themselves, for not upgrading to broadband?
Is the general feeling in the industry, that people want quality images, and the dial-up users have nobody to blame but themselves, for not upgrading to broadband?
I still design for slow dial up connections. That 50% figure is misleading. There are huge geographic areas in the US that will be left with lousy dial-up connections for a long, long time. I have lived in a few of them over the past decade :}
As a resident of rural America, where there is no Walmart down the road, I often found myself shopping over the net. I wasn't about to wait for my 48k (on a very good day) connection to slowly dribble in some bells and whistles site.
WBF
Everywhere else, the image size is 15K or less. Generally on the "or less" side.
Fast loading pages will never go out of style. ;)
Yep, on some sites... where usefulness is greatly enhanced by imagery, I push the limit. I look at it this way, I would rather build a site in a growing market using a growing technology. The key is growing with technology not trapped by what once was. IMHO
In the UK, which has a relative small area, broadband availability is growing fast. In my rural locality broadband will become available in June this year - which is good news for me. :)
But just because broadband becomes available it doesn't necessarily follow that people will convert from dial-up. It's a significant price jump that a lot of casual internet users may not feel worthwhile.
The way I see things going is, as soon as most areas are served by broadband in Canada, the phone companies will begin to phase out dial up. By phasing out redundant dialup infrastructure, the cost of broadband will come down.
Most of my orders use to occur between 9 and 5 which indicated that people were shopping at lunch hour (for their time zone) at the office, where broadband penetration was the highest.
Now adays I see more orders in the evening with less orders during the workday, indicating a increased broadband penetration at home.
Regardless of page size, I find shopping on a dialup
connection extremely painfull, after using broadband.
[edited by: lgn1 at 2:31 pm (utc) on Jan. 3, 2005]
the phone companies will begin to phase out dial up
I suspect they would like to, but I doubt if they will be able to get away with it for a long time, at least in the UK where telecoms is regulated. It reminds me of the hype put out by the BBC that their analog TV would be phased out and replaced by digital. That seems to have died a death...
They couldn't be farther from the truth. The lowest common denominator should STILL be a requirement of site design but most people are ignoring it. Personally I'm just outside the cable line, suffering with satellite while my neighbors not a mile away are enjoying high speed DSL. I also prefer to leave my monitors at 800 X 600.
I say yes, graphic sizes and graphic-heavy designs are increasing majorly, IMO.
While it may be that a slim majority of North American surfers have broadband access, it is also true that a heavy majority of broadband networks frequently don't perform at their maximum potential. I have an industrial strength broadband connection myself, but from time I still find myself waiting (due to congested resources, network outages or just the ravages of general Internet weather).
Consider this: in the world of video production designers use two frames inside of the actual video frame to guide them. The outer frame is called "Action Safe" and the inner frame is called "Title Safe", and basically they mean this: on a really, really #*$!ty TV, your titles might be cut off unless they're inside this ultra-conservative safety zone. Why? Because they're a wide, wide world of TV sets out there. Professional motion graphics designers DO NOT design for 42" plasma screens.
I've seen what my visitors are using, and 800x600 displays are still out there. A lot of those people have 28,8 modems, too.
As mentioned by another poster, I generally keep fat multimedia to areas where the user has more or less implicitly agreed that that's what they want -- "click for a larger image" and so on. Other than that, I aim just north of the lowest common denominator.
good images can be used which are still small in filesize.
additionally disregarding the end user for a minute but the bandwidth I use serving pages costs me money, so i'd like to keep that to a minimum.
anecdotally i would add that i have competitors who have pages that are graphic intensive and come in at 2+ megs, this is just ludicrous and even with broadband takes a while to download.
Now with the broadband at a majority of the consumer market, I tend to go for the quality over the load time.
NASA is a good example of going broadband crazy. They even slow down my ultra-broadband connection, and I am no way sugesting going that crazy.
