Jay Honeck wrote:

I turn once again to you, the great internet gurus of aviation, for answers
to the mysteries of the web...

Yesterday NPR announced that only a third of internet users are connected at
high speed, using either DSL or cable. This truly surprised me, and I'm
absolutely amazed that so few people have made the jump to high-speed
internet -- I could never, ever go back to dial-up, and have been on cable
modem for years.

Because of this rather shocking statistic I instantly redesigned our webpage
so that the home page is smaller and opens more quickly. (According to what
Frontpage was telling me, it would have taken several minutes to open over a
28.8 modem!) It never dawned on me to design the page for dial-up, because
I thought slow connections were on there way out!

I would suggest keeping the site simple enough that it doesn't require huge
amounts of bandwidth to display this week, even if huge amounts of bandwidth are
actually available. That is the art of web design, keeping the site useful and
attractive while keeping bandwidth and processsing requirements down. Even in
the age of faster computers and networks, efficiency is still king.

If you want to employ special features (including extensive Flash) that require
more bandwidth , do so by all means, but they can be an optional part of the
webpage that is somehow marked as requiring more bandwidth.

Be careful not to confuse Java (a compiled language which requires a virtual
machine [translation: more computer resources]) and Javascript. For example, I
tend to keep Java disabled since it slows me down when I don't expect it, but
almost always keep Javascript enabled. I turn on Java if/when there is a good
reason to.