APEX News - Special Edition
Disclaimer: Articles published express the views of contributing Authors and are not necessarily those of the APEX Board pf Directors and / or the APEX Newsletter Editor.
WEB PAGE LOAD TIMES
As you might guess, high speed broadband connections prevail in the workplace or wealthy households, while lower speed connections are common at home and for those who are truly in need of the service our world wide web provides. Page load time is critical and the dynamics of visitor attention spans, so loading your index page in such a manner as to make it slow using anything other than a high speed connection may prevent a visitor from looking beyond your first page.
The GVU Center and Dupree College of Management have been conducting the GVU / DCOM WWW Survey since 1994. Trends and developments are a valuable source of information when developing or maintaining a web presence.
If your primary objective in building a web site is to provide helpful information for your visitors, then determine which group of visitors would be visiting and plan accordingly.
Our effort has been determined to help those less fortunate than ourselves, therefore connection speed is a criteria consideration. We determine connection seed by using various online sources including the Numion.
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LOAD TIME IS REALLY NOT SO SIMPLE!
When we visit a web site, our web browsers are actually sending out a request or is ordering up a specific page that is identified by the web site address (URL or Universal Resource Locator.) Once that request is received by the remote computer, the data associated with the request - which includes things like images, HTML code, database-driven information - is passed through the Internet until it reaches your Internet Service Provider (ISP.) At this point your ISP passes the data on to your computer. The flow diagram which we created using public domain clip art (verified of course) shows that while one viewer may be satisfied with load time and another visitor may leave after eight seconds or longer to load, trying to determine whether our web pages are maximized for universal viewing can become rather complicated. For instance we should know by now that graphics in the gif or jpg format take longer to load than say a png graphic. Also that pre loading images and browser handling across the various browser client platforms also determine viewer satisfaction
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Viewer feed back could significantly improve overall Internet experience and enable a web site author to not only make improvements, but also become more knowledgeable of what is required to provide a satisfactory experience by visitors no matter what their ability or disABILITY. A more simplification of factors which influence load time are below, if you dear reader are interested. But the short explanation will probably suffice and send everyone onward to building web sites which are inclusive.
It's the sum total of the PING time, the number and size of the files requested (images, text, etc.), and the bandwidth (modem/connection speed) that will determine how long it takes for a web page to load on your computer.
Acknowledgement: The above article was provided by and is Copyright © D. Lancaster 1986 - 2011 with republishing rights held by APEX and may not be republished and / or redistributed without the written permission of the Author.