Quick – You do not have much time

Yes, this is the truth. It is said that the average time that a user spends on a website is very less. Let us not even get into statistics for this. You can analyse your own behaviour when you go searching for information on the net and you will realize how fast we move between websites!

Given this, the challenge is to make sure that your visitor spends enough time on your website so that they can get interested in your products and services. In this article, l will touch upon a few things that you can do and a few things that you can avoid for achieving this goal.

Size matters!

I do not know about how size matters in other popular areas of discussion! But I am very sure about it in the context of web page sizes. You have to keep it small – as small as possible. Your website designer might shove away this idea claiming that web speeds and broadband users have increased. I agree with this argument, but still a leaner website will load faster than a bulky website at the same speed and this is a big advantage.

f your page loads faster, then you will have your user seeing your website for more time. Would you rather not have them read about your products than have them wait for page loads?

Where are the heavyweights?

You have to review your page design and remove all things that are unnecessary. Jazzy designers tend to focus more on the appearance and inadvertently add a lot of graphics. Sometimes even text is converted to images so they can use of a specialized font. All of this makes the page very heavy and slow to download.

A website can be made to look very appealing and elegant without such high graphic content also. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allow a great deal of flexibility in arranging the elements of a web page without making the page heavy. Talk to your designer about this in you finds them using a lot of graphics.

Especially look for use of graphics and images in the navigation bar. This is a definite overkill and I cannot imagine any kind of website, whatsoever, that will need images to be used for navigation. Website can have a very good and very usable navigation system today by using a lot of proven technologies including JQuery.

Use the right type of graphics

A picture is worth a thousand words. This is true even in websites. Use photos, images and illustration wherever they are appropriate in your website, but make sure that you use the right image format.

For example use of high quality JPEG image should be avoided when all you want to show is a black and white illustration with some stick figures. Use GIF or PNG for such low resolution images with not much colour information. Use JPG images only where you need high resolution images such as full colour photos

Don’t Flash!

Another common item that adds to page size is large flash files. Use of flash files not only increases the page size but will affect your search engine rankings as they do not get fully indexed. Keep these to the minimum and use it only if it adds good value to the website visitors.

A common web design these days is to include a flash in the home page that covers about one third of the home page. You can go with this design but ensure that the flash file is not too heavy otherwise the home page will be very slow to load and will put off the users.

Review these and other aspects so that you keep your website lean and mean. Your users will surely thank you for that.