Design & Publishing . / . WEB . / . Pixelsmith . / . Beware the Single Pixel-Trick . / . Testing...

The single pixel gif?
(continued)

Do a little testing.

Try this same testing for yourself. Make notes, keeping your eye on the progress bar. You'll see that early morning loads are faster not only due to the lower load, but because more bandwidth could be dedicated to the animation, making its cycles run faster and accommodating the graphics. A "blip,blip,blip" as opposed to a "ka-chunk-contacting-wait, ka-chunk-contacting-wait, ka-chunk-contacting-wait."
__ These tests will also vary according to your geographic location and your provider's up-stream links into the backbone. Our provider here goes through two gateways before hitting a bona fide backbone. In metro areas you may be only one step to the backbone so things may happen a lot faster. In rural areas (or over AOL) you may have a half-dozen gateways to navigate before actually hitting the superhighway. So, that's why many webmasters sometimes can't understand readers who say their site loads slowly... did you ever have the webmaster or service provider say "there's no problems here!" They don't understand the remote users' plight because they're plugged directly into the backbone.
__ One programmer for CNet recently brushed off a complaint when in reality he was connected directly to CNet's backbone via a T3 line. Give that guy a 16-meg 486/14.4 modem on AOL (like millions of others) and see how he feels. But that's another whole problem we need to investigate another time.

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