Tim Flight

I came across a site today with a very unique product. Basically it is a GPS receiver that you take long with you while skiing that is constantly logging your position. Then at the end of the day the data can be downloaded, analyzed, and printed showing you things like the number of runs you took, top speed, and a 3D map of your travels. Very cool!

What isn’t super cool is their website design. Actually the design itself is fine (actually good) however it was poorly implemented. They seem to have forgot many, many people still use dial-up modems. When designing pages I attempt to keep them all under 30 kb. Sometimes they go longer but 30 kb is my target. A 30 kb page will load in about eight seconds over dial-up. Tolerable.

The homepage of the website in question is a whopping 367 kb! More then ten times my recommended size. In fact, over a dial-up internet connection this site will take over one minute and fifteen seconds to load! How many people do you think will wait seventy five seconds for one page to load?

The sad part is that it doesn’t have to be that way. The site looks great once it loads indicating that it was probably built by a graphic designer who doesn’t have much website experience. While the site is graphically intense it could easily be optimized without sacrificing image quality.

It is really too bad this site wasn’t properly implemented. I write articles about GPS systems and was going to write an article about them, however I’d rather not link to a site that won’t be viewable by so many visitors.

Oh, one more thing. They have a news page which shows videos of news coverage of their product. You can view it in both Windows Media and Quicktime formats. Next to the Windows Media icon it says “faster” while next to the Quicktime formats it says “slower”. I prefer QuickTime so I loaded one of the movies….

Well, the reason the Quicktime movie is “slower” is because the file size is four times larger than the windows media file. Why? I have no idea… it doesn’t have to be. I guess the person who created the Quicktime version didn’t know what they were doing because it took me less than one minute to compress the original 20Mb movie down to 5Mb without sacrificing any image or sound quality. I also produced a copy suitable for dial-up users with a little bit of sound quality loss that was less than one twentieth the size of the original at less than one Mb.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Website Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.