According to The Times newspaper today 40% of UK households do not have broadband and, of the UK customers that do have broadband 44% of them do not know what broadband speed they receive.
The percentage of households without broadband should be taken into account when a website is designed. The reason being is that for the users without broadband it takes a lot longer for a web page to load on their computer than it does for a person with high-speed broadband. Therefore, If a website does not cater for the current 40% of households without broadband then this will have a negative impact on the website. For example, users simply may not wait for a website to load if it is taking a while and, they may be frustrated when it actually does load so the website is already facing an uphill struggle to gain that users trust and affection.
There are many factors to take into consideration to optimise a website for users with and without broadband but, the key word is optimisation:
- For example photos need to be optimised for the website and not used unnecessarily. Optimising a photo for a website (in a nutshell) is all about balancing an acceptable image quality with an acceptable file size. So, the higher the image quality the higher the file size will be which means the longer it will take to download.
- Also, a website that is hand-coded rather than created with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software will reap dividends. Hand-coded websites is a way to separate the wheat from the chaff so-to-speak as WYSIWYG software adds a lot of “code” that is surplus to requirements and just inflates file sizes which inflates loading times.
One final word from me on broadband. Research conducted by the BBC found that roughly 3 million households in the UK have broadband speeds of less than 2 megabits per second (2Mbps). The Government has pledged that all UK citizens will have access to broadband speeds of at least 2Mbps by the year 2012.
