Design and Develop for Usability Over Speed !

"Sometimes in web site design we lose site of our users, even when we think we're staring them right in the dial-up connection. What I'm referring to is the concern over document weight over usability. Excessively fat markup that is not borne with semantic markup in mind is wrong, but there are times when your pages will not slide in under the ten second rule (or is it 8 seconds now?). This is article is not designed to help you speed up your site, but instead is to re-affirm your choices for semantic markup."

It is important to set reasonable goals for your development and design projects regarding size, speed and content. If you’ve not set reasonable goals you could find yourself beating your head against the wall attempting the miraculous due to bad goals. If you’ve got a lot of content to fit onto a page with a great many graphics (as various sites are in need of if multiple products or logos) you can expect that speed will be slower. If speed will be slower optimize your page so that text is shown quickly and that images show up secondarily allowing users to find content regardless of server, image or bandwidth issues.

Take a deep breath and realize a few things that are to your advantage ...