When you knew that the majority of visitors to a website were using a 56K dial-up modem for their connection and only those living close to the local telephone exchange with a good quality phone line would achieve anywhere near the maximum throughput of that modem, then the speed of page load was the ultimate concern. Use of media was carefully considered and every graphic and image was optimised to be as trim and toned as visually possible.
Unfortunately one of the downsides to the increased availability of fast broadband access is that some developers disregard the amount of bandwidth available or used by their increasingly bloated websites.
Instead of websites that appear almost instantly and operate at lightning speeds we find pages that are no faster now, in relative terms, then they were 10 years ago. It seems that now the goal has become how to use as much as possible of that ever-increasing allowance of bandwidth to cram more and more visual content onto a single webpage.
True, social media, the tools, computers and software available now mean we have the type of websites that early Internet users could only have dreamt of. But surely with a little thought and work we can find a middle ground that delivers a rich user experience without the need for so many of the bandwidth hogging websites that are so common today.
Maybe we could get Google et al. to provide a performance ranking along with their search results so that we could make a choice on which websites to visit based on their resource usage and conserve some of that valuable bandwidth for downloading movies, music or content “we” have determined is worthwhile as opposed to content forced upon us by those lazy web developers who pour more and more content into already heavy web pages.
