You can access their Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwidth at:
http://www.aptivate.org/webguidelines/Home.html
Don't worry about bandwidth!
Soon we will all have infinite bandwidth for no cost.
Heard that before?
In fact it is not true for the majority of the world's population. Many people in remote locations and the developing world do not have fast Internet connections and won't be getting them any time soon.
This is why Aptivate has written a set of Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwidth, at a time when web site optimisation seems to be going out of fashion.
Very interesting to see the world statistics for bandwidth and Internet access costs. Just goes to show how lucky we are in Western Europe / North America!
Also, here are a couple of the "tips" which particularly caught my attention:
- drop using HTML tables for layout, switch to CSS: this has been discussed over and over and over, again and again and again, and yet... well, you get my drift =);
- make your site cacheable: basically, avoid getting too wild with dynamic content;
- externalise your CSS stylesheets and JS scripts: load it (them) only once for the whole site or sets of pages and let the browser subsequently use the cached version;
- minimize the use of HTTP requests: there are lots of ways to do this like client-side form validation using Javascript, making sure dynamic pages don't require looping back to the server for pulling in extra files (CSS, images, etc.), and so on and so forth.
- file and image optimisation: shrink PDF and optimise images for use on the web;
- provide some sort of support for 'old' browser versions which may have limited support for CSS, Javascript, etc.
- ...
There is a lot more interesting information on the site covering a variety of topics: high-level design, CSS, caching, compression, multimedia, browser compatibility, search, PDF optimisation, and much more. Well worth the read!
Thoughts?
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