Ask Felgall

I recently had someone from Kontera contact me about adding their advertising to my web pages. They had previously contacted me a couple of years ago and I had investigated their advertising and written a review of it but they had obviously forgotten about that.

Since they had invited me to join (for a second time) I decided to take another look at their setup to see what had changed. The two things i was able to find out were that:

1. They still don’t support Opera and still have their script set up so that Opera users end up downloading it even though it doesn’t work for them.
2. Instead of the huge 18k script that they were using when I first looked at their setup they now have a 39k script.

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Not everyone uses a fast connection to the internet, there are still some people using dialup connections. Unfortunately some web page creators (they are certainly not webmasters) forget about this and create web pages that are way bigger than they ought to be making their page almost unusable to those on dialup and in many cases even frustrating those using broadband connections where no one should have to wait more than a second or two for a web page to load. If you are being constantly frustrated by slow loading web pages then why not turn off the images in your browser and speed the loading of the page that way. You should still see all the regular text content of the page as well as the alternate text that provides the same information as the images that you are not seeing so that you will not lose much by it and the pages will load a lot quicker. This of course does assume that the web pages have properly defined alt attributes on the images.

Text Only Browsing (Turning off Images)

For those people still using a dial up internet connection, the amount of time that you can actually spend connected to the internet will be somewhat more limited than you would get with a broadband connection. By planning out what you are going to do in advance you can arrange things so as to make the best use of the time that you spend online by leaving many of the tasks that can be done without requiring the internet to be connected right this minute to those times when you are able to work on your computer and are not connected to the internet. This is useful for example if you have two separate times each day when you can use the computer but want to avoid having to connect to the internet on both occasions.

Working Offline

People’s expectations on how ffast a page should load changes as they move from dial-up to slow broadband to fast broadband. While a page might have been considered to have an acceptable load time if it took 20 seconds to load on a dial-up, two seconds might be considered to be too slow on a fast broadband connection. Until internet connection speeds become significantly faster than current broadband speeds, I therefore stand by what I said several years ago about 40k being a good target size for web pages and 100k being huge. My suggestions on how to optimise a web page to get it to fit within these limits are therefore just as appropriate today as when I first wrote them.

Is My Web Page Fully Optimized?