Comments

February 28, 2008 at 12:37 pm

(1) fnairb says:

I don’t even know anyone that still uses dial-up and I’m certainly not going to pay for it just to test a page.

February 28, 2008 at 2:37 pm

(2) Bob Scott says:

You mean like an iPhone??? HAHA!!
(I couldn’t resist!)

Bob

February 28, 2008 at 6:09 pm

(3) B says:

Why do you need to test for it? The whole idea is to keep a page as lean as possible. If you are using validation, it should let you know of warnings.

Just checked one site of mine and 6% use dialup. You may not know anyone who uses it, but they are still out there… just like windows 98 users. =]

February 28, 2008 at 9:29 pm

(4) Corky says:

I agree with B. You keep your pages as lean as possible and always, ALWAYS keep in the back of your mind when your creating a site that someone somewhere is using 56kbps. Try someone using Windows 3.x.

February 29, 2008 at 2:12 am

(5) Ellen says:

If you have the web developer toolbar add-on for Firefox, there are quick links to validation at W3C and elsewhere, but also a speed report. The report compares speeds related to different downloads, but then also analyzes what things are affecting your download speeds. Even though I don’t use a modem, I live in a rural area with wireless, and there are ALL kinds of things that effect my internet access, so fast, lean web sites are a God-send. Nothing worse then having a “fat” website be even slower because the wireless service is slow that day.

February 29, 2008 at 2:31 am

(6) Keith Mountifield says:

There should really be another option on this poll… ‘Depending on the target audience’. If your site is aimed at young people who play games online, the chances are that 99.9% of visitors are going to be on a high speed connection and you can design accordingly, If you’re site is aimed at users on and iPhone or other mobile device on a gprs connection then you MUST make it as lean as possible. You don’t have to set up your own dial up connection, there are a variety of online tools that will give you an idea of download times at various connection speeds.

Speed testing is not as important as it was 10, or even 5 years ago, but still has a place in the good web designers task list.

February 29, 2008 at 4:28 pm

(7) James Codding says:

I’ve used Frontpage and Dreamweaver and there are tools that show an estimated pageload speed as if the viewer was using dial-up. When I took over company website, the home page was heavily loaded with graphics and other info that could be spread over several pages. Original homepage load was estimated at 90 seconds. After paring it down, I was able to reduce to a 5 - 10 second load time.

March 1, 2008 at 2:08 pm

(8) Jennifer Kyrnin says:

I agree, these tools that show you estimated times are really helpful. I use them all the time, and recommend them. One site I like is the WebSiteOptimization.com Web Page Analyzer because it goes into more details about what you can fix.

The main reason I found testing on a dial up to be even more useful is that I really got a feel for what 10 seconds to load feels like. (Painful) Ironically, my friend who was showing me was much more patient than I was, I suspect because she’s used to the speed, while I’ve been spoiled for nearly 10 years now.

March 4, 2008 at 7:43 pm

(9) Paul M. Van Dort says:

Statistics can drive a person crazy …

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000599.html
May 29, 2006
Do Modems Still Matter?
At the end of March 2006, 42% of Americans had high-speed at home, up from 30% in March 2005, or a 40% increase. And 48 million Americans — mostly those with high-speed at home — have posted content to the internet.

http://blandinonbroadband.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/many-farmers-still-use-dialup/
This entry was posted on February 26, 2007
“Fifty-one percent of U.S. farms have Internet access, according to a July 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from 48 percent in 2003. More than two-thirds of them, however, still use dial-up modems to connect.”

I tend to believe that almost half the people still use dial-up. Some by choice and some because they don’t have a choice … except maybe satellite. I have 4 computers, all connected to HS but also have dial-up modems in them. While I don’t connect via dial-up very often I do use the “Speed Report” in the FireFox extension tool bar to check the download speed on most of my sites … especially the important pages like index.htm.

Rural USA can still be problematic for many people. Just a few miles outside of the center of Reno, NV, DSL is still unavailable and the “Phone” company doesn’t seem to care. The choices are then limited to Cable, Satellite, ClearWire, or Dial-up. I have many friends who use Cable, Satellite, and ClearWire … some are happy but many are not satisfied at all and would rather have DSL. Others still use 56k modems and can’t connect any faster than around 24-30Kb.

I value each and every visitor to my sites and don’t want to loose one due to a slow loading page. Whether you actually connect with a dial-up modem or use some sort of evaluation tool such as “Speed Report”, slow loading pages should be avoided.

March 5, 2008 at 8:42 am

(10) Bruce Meyers says:

I only have dial-up - no broadband available to me - so everything I do is dial-up. I try
to write everything clean and simple so that pages load quickly.
If I ever get DSL or some other broadband connection I am not sure how I will check through dial-up, so your question raises a question I never thought of before.

March 6, 2008 at 12:05 am

(11) Cynth says:

Some DSL providers also offer dialup numbers free to their subscribers. Check into it.

I’m on dialup in order to feel others’ slow-connection pain.

I design for usability, speed, standards, and SEO. The web pages I design load fast for dialup users, and like lightning for broadband users. It also helps those on wireless connections, peak-hour cable connections, handhelds, mobile phones, and those whose computers are unfortunate, unwitting spam zombies.

When page weight exceeds a 6-second download time via a 56kbps modem, I make sure that it’s because there’s content a user deliberately waits for — relevant, optimized pictures that illustrate the content, PDF downloads for printing, detailed data tables, etc.

March 7, 2008 at 12:49 am

(12) Marah Marie says:

I test for dialup - but I don’t alter my stylesheet for it. What I will do is cut how many posts are shown on the landing page of my blog, keep the sidebar trimmed down, make sure as much code validates as possible, keep the code lean (except when I write tutorials…I really need to add the CSS for those to my main stylesheet and get it off the HTML pages…it is sizable).

I have a modem installed and I don’t pay for dialup…I have it with both Earthlink and PeoplePC - Earthlink dialup is free with my broadband package, and someone else pays for PPC.

My blog loads slow on dialup but since there’s no AJAX, Flash, or scripts slowing it down, and because I do cut (shorten) a lot of the posts to make pages load faster, it’s not too bad (under 20 seconds, I know, that is kinda bad).

The problem is people who visit my blog are often on AOL dialup, so I have to test to make sure my pages can be downloaded by them without timing out or really messing up (but the pages do mess up on dialup and there’s nothing I can do about it…the text is readable but often there’s rows of black bars from the top of the page to the bottom covering all the CSS design elements - it’s weird, considering I don’t even use the color black in the design).

March 9, 2008 at 11:29 pm

(13) kkirk says:

Very timely question.

I’ve been looking at Silverlight Demos and things like GMail and Ajax based solutions… and these folks are so enamoured of the technology that they don’t care at all that it may take 2-5 minutes for some users to open up these 1MByte+ “pages”.

Advising that users should “upgrade” misses the point that many of the customers live in rural areas where high speed internet may *never* be financially viable, or be retirees which cannot afford to pay higher monthly internet rates.

The person mentioning “Depending on the target audience” is right, to a point.

Not all web sites “target” audiences, many are “targetted by” audiences. Even when they think they are the ones who do the targetting.

Would brick and morter stores turn away 20% of their potential customers, just because they weren’t capable of using the “hippest, more expensive technology”?

What an odd prejudice to have.

March 22, 2008 at 3:02 pm

(14) Laura says:

The fact that over 50% of people responding to your poll never test with dial-up is very obvious to anyone surfing with dial- up. I am amazed at how many pages take forever to load with dial up, especially bank websites. They are a good example, even with a high speed connection, when going to a bank website you are most likely to be visiting to do banking and want to do it quickly, so why do the webmasters put all the bells & whistles that take forever for dial-up to load? My mom’s computer has DSL and she does her banking online, she says the pages still take a long time to load and it would be quicker to write out the checks manually!

Do you think their target audience is only customers with high speed connections? I think not. I am in Michigan, metro Detroit area, and 80% of people that I talk to about the web still have dial-up. They just can’t afford the high speed connection. I still use dial-up myself and mostly because it keeps me aware of this very issue. Until high speed in my area is more popular, I will continue to use dial-up, and my customers are happy with this.

May 10, 2008 at 10:44 pm

(15) aalex says:

i still use dial up because no company has dsl in my area. what do i do ?! please help because i can’t keep on living my life with dial up.

June 19, 2008 at 5:18 am

(16) guard says:

Before reading this article I never thought of testing websites on a dial-up modem. It suprises me 45% of the voters did..