With the introduction of 56k modems a lot of web site owners decided
that now was the time to add all the "bells and whistles" to their
sites. In fact, many large corporate clients insist on it. Surprise...recently
Jupiter Communications announced 78% of us, will still be using slow
dial-up telephone lines well into the year 2003! Have you ever left
a site before the page had finished loading because it was taking
way tooooo long? We all have!
If you want to get people to "see" your site it has to load quickly.
Tip: If you are getting a lot of visitors and not many sales it may
be because people are leaving before your pages are done loading. What
is the solution? Keep it simple! You don’t need music to greet people...in
fact if they are surfing on lunch break or on the sly at work, as a
lot of us do, they will not appreciate an unexpected blaring music intro
anyway. Graphics are important, but you don’t want to get carried away.
A few small gifs are much better than a large one that takes forever
to load. Repeating these often throughout your site will make the other
pages load more quickly since once a graphic loads into the visitor's
computer, it doesn't have to load again. For example: your company logo.
You do have a company logo right? If not, see the tip: Get
Your Brand in our archives.
Well thought out and designed graphics, especially logos, are important.
To help your pages load even more quickly you will need to compress
your graphics. An experienced professional graphic designer can do this
without any loss of image quality. We suggest using Brad Miner for all
of your graphic design work. Brad is an expert at design, including
logos, his fees are very reasonable, and he has FREE stuff too! Browse
through examples of his work and get some freebies at minergrafx.com.
You know that you need to have fast loading pages but you want to make
your pages interesting and attractive so people will hang around and
also stop back. What you need to do is make your pages appear to have
more graphics than they really do. A few simple things can be done to
achieve this: 1.) Use a colored bullet to set off (and draw attention
to) key points in the text 2.) Use colored boxes and text that will
load instantly. Remember to keep that logo on every page, but use a
few of your other small gifs on a variety of pages so they are not boring
carbon copies.
So don’t scrap those simple pages just yet! Make them load fast and
keep them loading fast to keep visitors. Let those other guys slow their
sites down to a crawl. Reap the benefits as you get their customers
and make them your customers. Watch your sales soar as customers stick
around and click around your fast site!
Grayling provides marketing advice and copy writing for those wanting
to succeed at business.
Visit http://www.yourbizwiz.com
for more FREE advice and for all your e-commerce solutions!
YourBizWiz.com provides FAST Low-Cost Hosting and is committed
to your Online Success.
Grayling Lathrop is YourBizWiz!
Email him for FREE advice here:
or call him at (517) 447-4080.
