If you've looked at your web traffic status reports and see that visitors seem to be finding your site and don't seem to stay, you've probably lost them during your site's initial load time.  Thus, if you've been asking "Where do your visitors go?", you really should be asking "Why don't they stay."  Who cares where they've gone.  They're gone!

When addressing good design practices, it is hard to raise a single point without opening a "Pandora's Box" of other directly or indirectly related issues.  In this article we're simply going to address the singular most common reason behind "audience disappearance"; graphic laden, s-l-o-o-o-w loading websites.

There are many factors that go into a good web design.   Surprisingly, graphics aren't all they are cracked up to be in garnering your audience's interest.  Graphics and photo images should be used "judiciously".  And by "judicious", we do mean as few as possible.

What is the intent of your website?  Is it to entertain, provide information or make a sale?  Though there are websites who's intent is purely to entertain, those that we usually focus on in our articles lead to some form of online or offline sale.  Regardless, no audience wishes to be bored "out of their tree" waiting for something to happen.

Most of us are impatient by nature, we don't like waiting or inconvenience.  Thus don't kid yourself, few potential customers are going to sit around for 2 minutes while you prepare to entertain them.  If they've arrived at your site, their already interested in something you have to offer.  You owe it to them to "gratify" them with the information or product(s) they seek quickly.

SECRETS REVEALED!   Here are some basic rules to play by regarding your website "entrance":

• Insure your "home page" displays something to the viewer within five (5) seconds and...
• Insure your "home" page loads completely within 15 seconds or less on a 28k (yes! - 28k) dial-up connection.
• Utilize a "splash" page prior to your "home page" if you enable common browser facilities other than straight HTML or you're confident you just can't take another second off your home page's load time.  Java Applets, for one example, take time to load on their initial call.
• Don't use graphics for text representation (there are other good reasons for this beyond the scope of this particular article).
• Use a good compression tool for your essential graphics.

Now let's focus on those graphics we "can't live without", like your logo.  Assuming you have your graphic design, stock art or modified stock art was designed specifically for web display, you will still want a good graphic compression tools in your web designer's arsenal.  Yes we are telling you to always insure even stock "web art" is at its smallest possible file size.

By omission, we are not trying to minimize the absolute importance of a graphics being designed specifically for web display.  This is a complex subject all by itself.  We are stressing the importance of using good compression tools on ANY and ALL of your static or animated GIF and JPEG files.

We have found NO BETTER or easier to use tools than the following (no, we don't make a cent for this plug):

• JPEG & Static GIFs - ULEAD SmartSaver Pro 3.0.
• Animated GIFs - ULEAD GIF Animator 5.0.

Information on these products can be found at ULEAD's website, http://www.ulead.com.

The bottom line is to keep your website simple, clean and fast.   And then you won't lose those hard earned visitors to your competitors in cyberland nor put the "diehards" who stick it out on your site (for a while) to sleep!

- The Tech Tank -