One gets so used to the speed of broadband that one can forget that a), not everyone has it and, b), one may not necessarily have it all the time. This can have big implications for web design…

I deal with huge file sizes (often gigapixels and gigabytes) because my pictures are invariably large and very detailed. I want to present them at their best quality and therefore I have invested a considerable amount of time designing an internet image display system using zooming technology – where a proportion of the image is displayed according to the viewable browser area and the resolution the monitor can support. This is vital because even with the fastest internet speeds currently available one of my images can otherwise take anything from a few minutes to a few hours to download!

Zooming technology minimizes the time it takes to display the proportion of the image actually being looked at. So far so good. But what about all the fancy web design stuff – animations, menus, effects? These can build up to being quite large in file size and therefore potentially slow to download…

It was only when my wife plugged another phone into a spare socket in the house that I woke up to the fact that my spiraling web design was a potential speed issue. The broadband we use requires special micro-filters (electronic telephone line amplifiers and signal cleaners) on each and every active telephone connection – otherwise the signal quality – and therefore broadband speed – can suffer considerably. And so it did on this occasion – and what a wake-up call it proved to be!

I saw my web site as possibly others may see it – and it looked dreadful! It took so long to display that I can quite imagine that many people would give up! I could not have this! I could not approach galleries and ask them to check out my art/photography on the web with a view to representing me if this is what they might experience!

Thus I have taken some time out to completely revamp the whole web site. I feel the delay in displaying my web site is potentially letting me down and putting some people off looking at it…