Three weeks without DSL and I have a new perspective…

I recently returned from spending several weeks living in a small cabin in Maine. We were visiting my husband’s family, who run a summer camp there. The camp is at the end of a two-mile dirt road and surrounding by water on three sides. This makes for a beautiful spot to vacation, but a terrible spot to receive reliable Internet access. While the camp has had wireless Internet access for the past few years, the provider went belly up and no one has yet filled that void. The provider continues to maintain the wireless signal for himself (so he can have wireless Internet access at his home, near the camp), but it’s an on-again-off-again type of signal at best. While I was there, I couldn’t even download a song in iTunes, let alone surf to my heart’s content.

OK, let me get to my point… in recent years we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of broadband Internet users. This has led a large majority of web designers to basically ignore the dial-up users. Yes, ignore. OK, so we haven’t created 2MB home pages, but we have gradually let our file sizes increase. Come on, I’m admitting it… you can too!

Using that very intermittent (at best) connection was a good chance to see how dial-up users feel. I even have a few family members who still use dial-up, not because they want to, but because they live in rural parts of the country not yet served by any other connection type. (Don’t even get me started on satellite - it’s way to expensive for the average home user.)

So now I’m designing with fresh eyes, or rather the eyes I had many years ago before I found DSL. I certainly am not designing primarily for dial-up users, but I am at least looking again to make sure my sites aren’t unbearable for them.