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yep, time and time again, tests have proven that the limit of tolerance for the average online user to wait for a page to download is 8 seconds. if it takes your page longer than that, you are losing many viewers. 8 seconds may seen like a short amount of time, but when your dealing with info transmitted at the speed of light, that's astronomical (our moon is 1.3 light-seconds away).

download time is pehaps the most important consideraton in building a website. think of your website as a book. how long would you stare at a blank page before the text or image miraculously appears? how slow would you deliberately turn the pages of your book?

you may be a graduate of a zen school and want your viewers to savor the changing of the seasons while they wait for your pages to download, but i don't think so. there must be a million other more interesting things to do besides waiting for your stupid page to load.

here's a professional web desiger's guideline: for decent loading, the limit of total amount of bytes per page should be 28 kilobytes. (the 'total bytes' is the sum of HTML bytes and the image bytes.) 28kb? i've seen single animations on a page that have more bytes! yet for ultimate loading, one should strive for 18kbs. 18kb! i don't think that's possible for any Msntv user. make my day, and prove me wrong.

i'm jaded from my years online and i only allow 4-5 seconds for a page to load, but i am far from alone. many people decide that loading time for a page or image is too long, and in disappointment, hit their 'back' key. don't become a statistic. if you want your page destined for the "pages that suck because of it takes too damn long to load" file, that's fine.

here's the scoop on reducing bytes of images. if your images are in 'JPG' format, you can reduce your bytes considerably, and they will download fast without much picture quality loss, and will be a pleasurable viewing experience for MSNTV users, but on a computer your images will look like crap. the end.
if you host a page full of images, consider placing your lowest byte image first and your highest byte image last. a way to pacify your guests while your images are loading is to offer a preamble or introduction. while the viewer is reading your 'bla bla bla", your images are quietly loading. sneaky, but effective.
avoid high-byte sound files. a very common mistake is to use these on a page, but often the guest has read all the text and seen all your images, clicking on to the next page before the song has started playing! fix that. now.

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