Sunday 2 November 2008

How big is your homepage? - in this case small is better

I've been on holiday this week to somewhere with not much bandwidth and it struck me how annoying unnecessarily heavy pages are.

In response to the poor availability of bandwidth at many worldwide locations my company's intranet has a page weight limit of 30kb in place. Of course some of the pages go over, and the homepage definitely does, but most don't.

In these days of broadband everywhere (and I would suggest that all of your employees have broadband at home to access your intranet) this does seem like a rather old fashioned idea. Trouble is the really advanced users are using your intranet on a mobile device or connection. If your experience is anything like mine even 3G (when you can get it) pretty much creeps along. This means that lightweight pages are going to work best for everyone.

Even better, when you start constraining the 'creative' souls around you with a bandwidth limit (and definitely no banners and flash) you suddenly start working out what is really important and useful on that page.

Great to hear any opinions on this one. In particular, leave a comment saying how big your homepage is if you can. Can someone also leave a post telling us all a quick way to know how big your page is?
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous2 November 2008 at 21:35

    I agree. Once we start to roll out intranet access on our Blackberries and iPhones, there will be some serious pressure on page size...

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  2. Kurt Kragh Sørensen3 November 2008 at 22:10

    Velcome back from holiday.

    Here you can see, what your website look like on a mobile device:
    http://google.com/gwt/n

    And I also agree, that page size will be important especially if price for internet access via mobile is as high as in Denmark.

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