One of the first things I learned as a web designer is that I should design a website as if the visitor is the most impatient person in the world. Why should I do this? Because the vast majority of visitors to websites are very impatient.
You would think that in these days of broadband that all web pages would load fast. However, this is not true. Websites are becoming ever more sophisticated, especially in terms on interaction with users and the result of this is that many websites are loaded up with all sorts of codes, gadgets and plug ins that seem to make them slower than websites were more than 10 years ago when we were struggling with those slow telephone modems.
Thankfully, there are many things that can be done to speed up a website and you will be pleased to learn that Net Quality Web Design Nottingham already uses these techniques for its clients (more on that later).
The first method used is compression of web pages. GZ is an Internet site's version of the more familiar zip file. The server where the website resides compresses the file that produces the web page so that the time spent downloading the page itself is reduced by more than 50%. ALL modern web browsers are capable of automatically uncompressing web pages that are served in this form. It is a very easy thing to achieve but surprisingly, very few web designers are using it.
Have you ever wondered what is happening when you see a picture appearing on a website that appears to be being drawn one line at a time? This is the result of a poorly optimised (or not optimised at all) image file. This is also something simple to do and thankfully most web designers do this as a matter of course. However, if you see something like this on your website you should be having a word with your web designer.
Net Quality's websites are hand coded. We do this because websites coded by software tend to be bloated with unnecessary code which we can studiously avoid. It makes a small difference on most websites but every little helps. This is something quite rare you will find with few web designers.
A surprising number of UK websites are hosted on servers in the US and Germany. This extra geographic distance does make quite a difference and if this is coupled with a poor server, a website's speed can take a big hit. We hire fast reliable servers based in the UK so we are not subject to such delays.
Earlier on in this artice I mentioned that Net Quality uses almost all these methods. That is because we have not yet implemented this nifty little idea but we will be including it on new websites from today. You may have noticed when waiting for a website to load that the pictures are the last thing to appear and they seem to arrive one by one. Each image is a hit on the website's server and each hit causes a small delay in the donwload of your web page. If similar images are grouped into one image and only a part of that large image is displayed on different parts of the website, it vastly reduces the number of hits and in turn, the speed of your website.
So as you can see, speed is important and if you come to Net Quality to have your website designed you can be sure that we will have done everything to make your website as speedy as possible.