There are a four issues at play here:
1. CMS-based websites, like www.zone-10.com have a lot of php overhead. Fine
for broadband, but horrid for dialup. Actually, not as bad for iPhones and
stuff because there is a bunch of intelligent php filtering going on in the
portable web-enabled devices to speed things up a bit.
2. Assumed visitor access bandwidth. Dial-up speeds is now considered to be
on the outer-edge of the user bellcurve. We've had to leave the
speed-sensitive behind in many cases to improve the user-experience for the
majority.
3. Advertising links. They really do bog the system down. But since our site
is not subscription-based, we'll take all any revenue we can get. It's not
much, but it does keep the website lights on. In our case, as we migrate
our business to the next phase of operation, the "information side" of the
website may change focus. Another hidden thing on most sites now is
visitor-tracking stuff. Don't think for a second that this has no bandwidth
overhead! But for us publishers, this information is golden!
4. Image Quality. At www.zone-10.com, we've grown our standard image size
to 800 pixels wide, plus a 20-pixel white border. This is our signature look
and does set us apart from most photography websites that limit picture
width to 500-600 pixels. Another factor is the quality of the JPEG files.
The average image size for us is somewhere between 90k and 120k. I
personally dislike JPEG artifacts and will only compress to the point where
they start to become visible. Unfortunately, there are a lot of images
recently with tremendous amounts of detail and texture which do not compress
well and those images are substantially larger. Initially, we were aiming
for the 60k file size for the dial-up visitor, but there is no way we can do
that and maintain a decent level of quality in the image--especially since
we do also keep the sharpness up--it's easy to have a larger image size with
higher compression if you don't resharpen after resizing. I have used
"progressive JPEGs" as this was a nice method of helping out dial-up users,
but unfortunately not all browsers handle progressives correctly and in many
cases the image will not fully load so you get a heavily pixelated image or
worse yet, a partial image. We've been experimenting with articles with
fewer pages but lots of pictures and articles with many pages and one only
picture per page. Based on tracking data, we're actually better off with
fewer pages with more elements.
I know that the www.zone-10.com website is a bear for those with dial-up. In
fact, it can be a bear for others with reasonable speeds--especially those
living in the jungles of Malaysia--DSL doesn't work well in trees! One
solution that we've considered is shifting the site over to a CMS with
better performance as well as multi-language and country-sensitive support.
We're currently using Mambo, but any change would mean a mammoth undertaking
which I estimate around 200 man-hours to initiate the site and migrate over
the existing articles. Given the uncertainty of Mambo, this will eventually
happen anyway, but I'm hoping for a staff of people to handle it. ;)
If/when we do migrate the site, it is very likely that we'll reformat the
home-page differently to provide for an exceptionally speedy response.
AG (cooking and washing) Schnozz
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|