As more and Africans are able to connect to the Internet, the disparity in bandwidth between African users and broadband users elsewhere is becoming quite evident. In the following table, Aptivate highlights the lag faced when accessing major news sources from a slow connection.
|
page load times in seconds
|
Connection Speed
|
|
Developing University
(20 kb/s)
|
Dial-Up
(56 kb/s)
|
UK Broadband
(3000 kb/s)
|
|
Page
Size
|
smallest (20 kB)
|
8
|
3
|
0.1
|
|
average (250 kB)
|
100
|
36
|
0.7
|
|
largest (800 kB)
|
320
|
114
|
2.1
|
Source: When it comes to websites… small IS beautiful
Optimizing for fast load times can be an enormous task, especially for webmasters used to designing for broadband. Fortunately, Aptivate has put together a great list of guidelines for designing for low-bandwidth users.
- No Page Bigger Than 25kB
- Reduce Images
- Have Good Site Structure
- Use Style Sheets
- Minimise HTTP Requests
- Turn on Compression
- Be Cache-able
- Avoid PDFs
- Put Useful Items First
- Show Link Sizes
About the author: Theresa Carpenter Sondjo is an entrepreneur and web developer. She lives in Cotonou, where she and her partner run
People Online. Their mission is simple:
la mise en ligne du Bénin. Follow her on Twitter at
@theresac.
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Designing Websites for Low-Bandwidth Users
As more and Africans are able to connect to the Internet, the disparity in bandwidth between African users and broadband users elsewhere is becoming quite evident. In the following table, Aptivate highlights the lag faced when accessing major news sources from a slow connection.
Optimizing for fast load times can be an enormous task, especially for webmasters used to designing for broadband. Fortunately, Aptivate has put together a great list of guidelines for designing for low-bandwidth users.