Blogs That Crawl
High speed internet connections are now common place in many homes all across the USA, Europe and Asia. It is probably normal for many blog readers to being reading via broadband but in fact there is still a higher percentage of people using dial-up connections at home or surfing the net in shared bandwidth internet cafes.
I am one of these low bandwidth surfers - my home connection is via dial-up because broadband is not available in my area. Other connections I often use - wifi in cafes or internet cafes, are often pretty slow. So for me it is really annoying when I visit a blog and it is full video content, hi-res images or overloaded with so many widgets and offsite hosted buttons that it takes 5 mins to just load the frontpage so I can read some content. Unless I know there is something on the blog that I am looking for, I will most likely leave before reading anything at all. It will almost certainly stop me from staying on the site for very long or ever returning as it is so frustrating to be waiting around.
I understand though that for many sites this kind of content is key to the experience and is sometimes the main focus of the blog but there are ways to reduce the ‘heavyness’ of the index page. I think limiting the amount of graphic buttons and advertising is a good way to not bring things down to a crawling speed - and this applies to all sites. Sites with too much advertising and ’subscribe me’ buttons can overload the senses anyway, making for a bad user experience more chance of ‘ad blindless’ and less chance of people hanging around.
For those people that images and video are essentials than simply limit the amount that is shown on the index page. Show no more than 2/3 images or 1 video on the frontpage and leave the other content to be read inside the posts enticing readers in with ‘…more’ tag. This simple method involves adding the code <!–more–> into the html of your post and your blog software should then cut you post short and provide a hyperlink to the full aritcle. This makes it easy to control the amount of bandwidth hogging content on your front page. It also gives a neater look and means you can have more post titles on show at once.
It is common practice on many sites but then there are countless others that are probably losing readers by making there index page too full of content for many readers. Take a look at you own site and if possible try testing it with a slow connection - you might be surprised just how annoyed you get!
Sorry to hear you don’t have DSL in your area yet, I know how that goes and it sucks bigtime. It’s like having poor eyesight, you never know how bad your eyes are until you get used to wearing contacts and then have to do without them.
Nice blog, maybe if you don’t use the term “b-l-o-g” so much you can get better targeted adsense ads?
Best,
JayOreilly
Comment by Jason Oreilly — April 6, 2007 @ 11:00 am
What makes it worse is that I do use broadband on a regular basis just not at home (about half my internet use is at home) as I live away from the center of the city. So the speed difference is very fresh in my mind.
Thats an interesting comment about not using the word b-l-o-g to improve adsense relevence. My primary concern right now is getting more traffic as I dont believe i can earn anything from adsense until I have some good viewing figures but I will certainly think about what you said - thanks for the suggestion.
Phil
Comment by Phil — April 6, 2007 @ 11:18 am
Fantastic it.
………………………..
Malshi.
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. Free SMS and free mobile ads!! Its fantastic
Comment by Kumari — May 4, 2008 @ 3:36 am