August 9, 200917 yr Hey Guys Ok so this is my first meaningful topic of conversation, I thought I'd as you all what you thought. The trend at the moment is often hyper-realistic designs, however to keep them looking hyper-realistic outside of Photoshop it often means large file sizes and therefore long load times. I know its hardly the world of 56K anymore but I personally don't like waiting a long time for websites to load and I get put off by anything taking longer than 10 seconds to load! (I doubt I am alone) I wondered what you all thought about this topic! Do you just think this design is too good to optimise and degrade with reduced quality! I often spend a long time making my designs, I get annoyed when I splice them and have to reduce the quality of them. Obviously I use as much CSS to replace solid colours, but that only goes so far. Let me know what you think.
August 9, 200917 yr Remember that the use of mobile devices to access the internet is increasing - these devices don't have the speed you normality get on desktop computers. You also have more people using devices for always have wireless internet access to their laptops while they travel. They don't always get the speed of a wired desktop. The content is what matters. It should always be easily accessible. Good looking site is nice - but if it severely affects the users to access the content you're quickly going to strain you user's patience. Designers are typically more inclined to be more lenient towards stylish design - but often turn blind to the user experience. I can't answer the poll - speed is included in quality of the site. They aren't mutually exclusive.
August 9, 200917 yr It's always a question of need - that 500kb "photoshop" template may look the bees knees to you but you're sites visitors won't really give a hoot about it - all they want is to be able to get to your content with the minimum of fuss.
August 10, 200917 yr oops meant to vote for speed. I love simplistic sites that are really attractive. Plus I hate visiting a site on my G1 google phone and having it take forever,
August 10, 200917 yr you can't have quality without speed.... but speed shouldn't have to mean no graphics and skimmed down stylesheets/scripts - it should just mean a quality design can always be optimized for speed. it shouldn't be a choice and there doesn't have to be a compromise.
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