Just about everyone who surfs the web these days has a broadband
connection to the Internet. So why bother spending a lot of time
making an optimized web site.
Is the page size really important? So what if my web page is
250k instead of 50k. That is only a few seconds difference on a
good connection. Right?!
I hate it when web programmers think this way. WAY back in the
old days a boss of mine handed me a 16 page document that explained
the concept of this new thing called HTML. This "company" called
NCSA just put out a product called Mosaic and wanted everyone to
download it. They changed the Internet as we know it. At the time
14.4 baud modems were new and getting a PC to connect to the
Internet usually required a call to tech support.
A lot has changed since then that is for sure. There are a lot
of languages you can use to create a website (ASP.Net, PHP, Ruby on
Rails and many more) but the final output is HTML.
The big sites like Google spend as much time optimizing their
sites as the do actually creating the code to render them. It saves
them millions of dollars. What you didn't know it could save a
company money? Well lets think about that a minute. The main Google
web page is under 30k and millions of people hit that site every
day. So they have to have the severs and the bandwidth to handle
that. Imagine if the site was a monster 150k in size and had all
kinds of bells and whistles. Every person who comes to the site to
search would have to download that page prior to doing anything.
Which means that Google would have to have extra servers and
bandwidth to handle this traffic. Which costs a lot of money. By
making a their main page smaller they are saving a lot of money. So
by saving money, they make more money. Basic business concept.
Now Google is kind of extreme. Very few website have that kind
of traffic. But every business owner would like that kind of
traffic. So why not spend the extra effort when building a site to
make it as fast as possible.
Here are a few links to help out.