The 25 Second Rule

It is easy, if you have a fast internet connection, to be lured into the assumption that the rest of the world has one as well. But a significant percentage of the people looking at your website are using dial-up connections, and you need to keep them in mind when designing your web pages. The 25 second rule is a good one to keep in mind: make sure your web pages can be downloaded within 25 seconds on a 56 kbps (kilobytes per second) modem.

If you are using Dreamweaver, this is easy to check. Look in the lower right-hand corner of the document window (see below; click to enlarge) and you will see the download time of whatever page you have up in the window.



To change the connection speed, and see how quickly your page loads at different speeds, use the pull dowbn arrow just to the left of the download time (see below; click to enlarge). Click Edit Sizes. from, there you will be able to choose from a variety of different connection speeds.