Ever since Mosiac, the first browser to display images, one of the primary concerns of web designers has been making their pages load quickly. People are usually not willing to put up with long waits for pages to load (even with cleverly animated preloading screens), so an effort has to be made to keep the download time as low as possible; this is often called “optimization.” Web site optimization has caused many a headache as form gave way to function. I want to look at several aspects of optimization, including reasons pages load slowly, ways to make them load more quickly, how quickly they should be expected load, et al.

First I want to look at the kinds of connections Internet users have. For years the only way to connect to the Internet for the home user was through a dial-up modem, which topped out at a mere 56 K. However, with the recent (last several years) propagation of so-called “high-speed Internet”, is speed even a concern anymore? How fast is “high-speed” Internet? Can I make my files as big as I want now? Let’s take a look.

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For some reason my blog is not rendering correctly on the computer I use the most.  None of the images are appearing, which totally ruins the layout.  I’ve checked it on other computers and it shows up fine so I’m assuming it’s something with the browser on my desktop.  That’s one of the reasons I haven’t updated, as I’ve been trying to solve that problem first, but it seems that it is only mine.  Let me know what you see on your end; notebook paper, or a bland gray background.

The fall semester is over and the Christmas break has begun.  I have to apologize to all my avid readers, but I don’t plan on updating my blog until after New Years.  (more…)