WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Usability tool for checking total page size

for

From: Holly Marie
Date: Jan 10, 2002 8:30AM

Many of your web editing and authoring tools might have this feature
built right in.

My Homesite will give document size or weights, and also image sizing
and weight for each image.
Though one has to be careful, because background images and certain
kinds of images embedded in other ways will not figure into the total
load time and amounts, both in online tools and off. So great care has
to be taken when loading in web site images in different ways.

Other tools that are great for image size and reduction are the graphics
app programs. They will generally give various download times for
different optimisations, when you try and export a web image. There you
will see what time it takes per image at various reductions of sizing,
as well as quality of the image with the various optimisations.

The Bobby tool was neat, Netmechanic(www.netmechanic.com) is good. I
have not been there in a long while, but believe they use to offer an
option for helping to cut the meat out of the page and images, too.

In case it was not mentioned.... Tune Up - Web Site Garage is another.
Load Time Check - reports load time from 14.4K to T1.
http://websitegarage.netscape.com/O=wsg/tuneup_plus/

A good rule of thumb, whether people have excellent connections or not,
is to keep that page total weight in around 30-50K.
Generally people surfing on the web, want results quickly, and are not
likely to enjoy waiting for any documents to load up for long lengths of
time. This is true also on the eCommerce pages, as well as the search
and directory pages. More and more people are opting for google
searching, than others because there is little to distract, and the tool
does just what you want and loads the quickest, or as one of the
quickest on the Net. Naturally if it is a Multimedia, art, or
sound/music site, this may take longer, but people viewing or visiting
those sites, know this and expect a bit longer download or loading
times. Many of my pages, including graphics are under 20K and some are
even less than 10.


Image sizing and doc weight are not the only items that affect a page
load, there are many items that these tools cannot check or factor in,
including:
Other things affecting download times:
Image heights missing
Table sizing missing
Too many tables and nested tables
(images in tables without sizing multiplies that problem.... table
cannot render until the image size is known)
use of many scripts, preloads, mm, etc... Background images may slow a
load, sliced images and image maps may slow a load.
Deprecated coding or older HTML coding... CSS and cleaner code not only
makes a web page doc smaller in size, it makes it easier for the browser
or device to understand and load up quickly. So nesting and other items
may greatly affect a page load.

yesterday, I experienced a very simple small page taking forever to
load... the reason?
Someone coded in a font tag with dreamweaver, set to some font that
*very few* people have on their systems, and there were no fonts or
generic font families listed in that tag. So, after my browsers... and
it was very very slow to load up in Opera.... looked for this barnum
family font and could not find it on my machine, then it had to decide
what font or use the default font on the web site. Not sure why it took
so long but it did. And the fonts it used messed up the display of the
page, that the designer was after.

Having too many fonts, in a list, may slow a page load, also. Or at
least I have heard this. 3-4 with a generic font-family named at the end
is a good idea.

Other Links:
EchoEcho, has tools and stats info, also:[good site]
http://www.echoecho.com/
HTML Help Validator, may... cannot remember, but it is an excellent
validator right up there with the W3C
server may be overbusy or down at times, but the validator is good and
gives examples where errors are in the web page.
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
From Web Site Testing Tools:
http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html
Load and Peformance Tools:
http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#LOAD
Other web Test tools(for various items including usability)
http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#OTHER
FREE load time check(not sure if it is an itemized check), online
[other web site tools available for free, too]
http://www.virtualstampede.com/tools.htm
Web Trend Tools for the web site[think they use netmechanic for one of
the tools}
http://www.webtrends.net/tools/
"Our Checker will check your entire site or a single page, showing you
the load times of your pages including all embedded objects. When we're
done we'll report all broken links we found and the status of each link
we tested."
http://www.webtrends.net/tools/mechanic/load.htm

Lift and there is a product for MM dreamweaver, but this one costs and
there is an online service, but believe that may cost...
and I believe this one was mentioned a few times, also.
http://www.usablenet.com/


holly





From: "Johanna Frohm"


> In the past one of Bobby's reports was a web page's total size for the
> page and the images on it. That is no longer provided, unless I am not
> looking far enough. Is anyone familiar with another online tool or
free
> / low cost downloadable tool that will provide similar information?
>
> This was a very handy report to illustrate the significance of
resizing
> images, the impact of file size on download time, and so on.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Johanna




-