Designing a Web Site for Your Congregation

Design for Efficiency

Different users have different access to the Internet via modems of different speeds or sites that don't have enough servers. Problems of access arise if your church site becomes the "cool site of the day" and many users try to access it simultaneously; or if users are accessing your site from geographic regions with reduced numbers of connections. Because you can't predict at what speed a particular user is accessing your information, it's important to design with efficiency in mind. This page contains tips on designing for low-bandwidth situations, if that situation should occur.

Don't Bury Information
In organizing the information on your Web site, try to make sure that the user can get to useful information in less than three clicks.

Minimize File Size
Smaller sized files take less time to display. If you have a large amount of text, consider breaking it up and organizing it on multiple pages. One good way to keep an image file small is to use a minimal number of colors. Gradations and three-dimensional effects also tend to bloat the size of image files. In general, try to keep file sizes below 50 KB for both text and image files.

Use Small Images
Limit the physical size of your images for faster performance. Be sure to crop your images as closely as possible. If you need to display a large image, consider putting it on a separate page and linking to it via a small thumbnail representation. This lets users decide if they want to take the time to view the image in its large format.

Repeat Images Where Possible
Using the same image in multiple places helps performance since once an image is downloaded, it can be subsequently accessed from the local memory cache. For example, using standard bullet characters, title banners, and separator images enhances performance.

Specify the Width and Height for Graphics
Specifying the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes for images makes your page appear to download much more quickly since most browsers can determine the page layout before the graphics are downloaded. The browser can display the text portion of a page first and fill in the graphics later. Users can begin to read your page before waiting for all the graphics to download.

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Prepared for Making Christ Known Conference November 22, 1997
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