20 seconds isn't a very long time.  Unless you are waiting for something to happen.  Like waiting for a web page to load on your computer.  Try this the next time you are surfing the web. After you click on a hyper link for a new web site check your watch and count off 20 seconds.  If the page is fully loaded (it says document done on your status bar) then this page has a chance of being read by a visitor to the site.  The truth is that most people won't wait over 20 seconds for a web site to load and many people won't wait past 10 seconds.  So the very first consideration in setting up web site for your real estate appraisal business is the load time.

The nice looking photo of your office or the dream house that you are featuring at the top of your site that is 60k in size could cause all the efforts you've put in to designing your site to be in vain.  In the time it takes this graphic to load your potential customer has already hit the "back" button on their browser and clicked on the next appraisal site that their search engine found.  I know that you are proud of your site and the photos and graphics are beautiful and it seemed to load just fine when you were loading it from the hard disk on your computer. If you are a multi-appraiser firm owner I know you are proud of your associates and want to display their photos on your page.  But if these things keep your page from doing the job it was designed for then it is time to rethink your strategy.

Even though computing technology has advanced greatly recently there is one thing that has not and that is the telephone line that data is transmitted over.  And even though 56K modems are common and cheap now the fact is that  the majority of internet surfers still use a 28.8k modem, and some even use a 14.4k modem.  So with this in mind let's look at what we can do to reduce the load time for your web page so that your average potential customer will stay long enough to possibly contact you and do some business with you. Which is why you wanted a web page to start with, right?

Graphics.  Don't take the above the wrong way. I do not mean you should not use graphics! Just that you should limit the size of the graphics so they will load in an acceptable time. By size I don't mean how wide and how tall the graphics are but the size in kilobytes.  Use 10k as a maximum size for your graphics and this should be only for photos and you shouldn't use over two per page that are as large as this.  I know that your new digital camera can do resolutions up to 1152 x 864 and the photos look great when printed out with  your color printer.  But you know as well as I do that these images take up huge amounts of disk space.  So when you use one of these high resolution images for your web pages you are shooting yourself in the foot. The reality is that all of this extra resolution is wasted on your average computer monitor.   There is a simple solution and that is image editing.  Use a graphics image editing program such as Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photo Shop to reduce the size of your graphics.  You can load the graphics in these program and reduce the number of colors, re-size, and crop the image until it meets your size goal in kilobytes and you will be amazed to see that you will not be able to tell any loss of quality in the image on your computer monitor (unless you try to reduce it too small).  Keep tinkering with the images until you get to the optimum size and that is the size which is the smallest possible in kilobytes but still looks good on the computer monitor.

Page Size.  After graphics the next thing that should be considered to optimize load time is the total size of your page.  Have you ever visited a site where you have to endlessly scroll down the page to get to the end?  Did you always scroll all the way to the end?  Most web visitors are impatient and don't like to scroll very far. Having most of your information on the main page of your site also makes this page very large and contributes to excessive load time.  Split your site into many easy to navigate pages and try to limit the TOTAL size of your main page to 30k INCLUDING the graphics. 

Conclusion. So set some goals for the size of your pages and graphics and some goals for the load time for your site.  Try to stay within (or close to) these goals.  Test your pages after you have placed them on your site to see how fast they load.  Make adjustments until you get an acceptable load time.  Your visitors will thank you for it and will probably stay around to do some business with you.

Wayne McKerley, RWM.NET

This article is copyrighted 1998 by Wayne McKerley and may be reprinted in other electronic or print media as long as the following information is included in its entirety and unchanged at the bottom of the article.

"Wayne McKerley is the webmaster of RWM.NET a web site with the goal of helping real estate appraisers market their services over the Internet. Wayne offers FREE  information and services such as FREE web site design for appraisers as well as a other services related to Internet marketing of appraisal services. Visit Wayne's site at http://rwm.net and get your appraisal site off to a good start.  Wayne may be contacted via ."

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