Technical Issues  

There are lots of different hardware out there. PCs, Macintoshes, Palm-top computers. Each has different monitors and screen sizes. Each has different download speeds. Inside there computers, there are different software. For each piece of software, there are different configurations. A good website has to take into consideration all these factors to reach the widest possible audience.

Research has shown that if you don't grab a user's attention within an average of 7 seconds, you will lose him or her, and they will likely move on to something else. With too much flashiness and features available, many people forget that a significant percentage of users have slow dialup connections. You can't grab their attention inside that 7 seconds if nothing has come up in that time!

Reducing download time can be done in many ways. For media files, such as video, audio, and graphics, the easiest would be selecting the right format. Each format will have sizes, advantages and disadvantages. The trick is finding the right format, and then reducing the quality until you find the right balance between quality and download size.

One thing that many designers don't know is a nice little feature called mod_gzip. It compresses the actual coding of the webpage, known as Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). HTML and its ‘supporting' languages really bloat up a file size, even though it is all just text.

One final good tip is that you have to carefully consider each and every feature. Flash animations, menus, applets, and so on. The seconds that they add to the download time mean a lot. Are these features just filler, or they truly add something to the user experience?

Similarly, with so many languages and so many features, making them all work with the different hardware and software configurations (see top of the article). Again, you have to ask yourself – is the feature essential? Will the user want to download the plug-in to view your feature?

Orphan pages and broken links: If you have a large site, you need a web gardener of sorts to find pages that are just left sitting there without any links leading to them. You've also got to check all the links in your page. Do they work?

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