3. Speed

If your site is too slow, people will leave before the graphics even load. Sometimes when we encounter a graphics intensive site, we will search for an alternative while that page is loading. Your users will do the same. Nobody likes a slow site.

You can increase your speed in many ways. Naturally you have to optimize your graphics. We recommend Macromedia's Fireworks or Adobe Image Ready. Make your files as small as possible without compromising too much on image quality.

Optimize your code. There are several utilities that will eliminate extra data from html files to make a page smaller in size. Use them on every page on your site.

Reuse graphics. Try to avoid creating extra graphics when you can use an existing one. A different graphic might make the site look a little nicer, but the existing graphic has usually already been loaded and is still in the user's cache. On this page, for example, there is probably not one new graphic. The only thing your browser had to download was the html.

Last, make sure your server can handle your traffic. If your server can handle 10,000 hits a month, and you're getting 20,000, do something fast. Either find a new, faster server, or mirror the site elsewhere. There is nothing you can do from a developers perspective to speed up a server. You can have the smallest graphics on the web, but your page will still take twice as long to load as it should. If you aren't sure how fast your server is, find out. There are plenty of utilities out there that test server speed.