Outdoor Events & Advance Ticket Sales

Being overweight is not healthy for both humans and websites.

With high bandwidth connections becoming more the norm, web developers and clients are often neglecting an essential area of web design. They forget to optimize graphics and website load times.

For events, unoptimized graphics usually come in the form of photography. It could be a great photo of a family having fun at your event or a picture of something delicious to eat at a food stand. Photographers want to capture as much information in their photographs as possible. That's great for the print world, but not for your website.

Where an issue arises is when those large photographs are uploaded to an event website. Lots of detail in a photo means a huge image. And large photos are too much extra weight on your website and bad for website load times.

"According to 2018 research by Google, 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load."

Source: Patel, N. (2019, February 15). Speed Is A Killer - Why Decreasing Page Load Time Can Drastically Increase Conversions. Retrieved May 6, 2019, from https://neilpatel.com/blog/speed-is-a-killer/

Back to yesterday's email, you have ten seconds or less to grab a user's attention. If your event website takes a few extra seconds to load, due to bloated graphics or sloppy website code ... you've lost, before your site even loads.

Long load times are particularly harmful to mobile websites. And with more and more people accessing your event website via mobile devices, you want to become vigilant.

The optimization issue becomes more prevalent when clients manage their own websites. Clients rarely pay attention to the size of the image their uploading. Frequently a full-size media image will be uploaded to a client's event web page. And that kills page load time.

Just last year, a client's web developer identified dozens of bloated graphics on their event website. What followed was a painful process of determining the overly large graphics and replacing each oversized graphic. That's a lengthy and time-consuming practice.

Fortunately, there is a straightforward solution. It won't solve every web site loading problem. But will get you and your team into the mindset and behavior of not uploading unoptimized graphics.

Here's an easy to use online tool that makes image optimization easy: https://imagecompressor.com/

If you're uploading images and graphics to your website, make sure to optimize all your images. Because every single second of load time counts!

Want to get more event website design info? Check out the articles below:

• What is Web Usability? And Why You Should Care . . .
• Web Usability: The Importance of Balancing Content and Graphic Design
• Hitting a HOME RUN with Your Web Site
• Don’t Pollute Your Web Site
• Do You Make These Usability Mistakes?
• Objectivity Paves the Way to Online Success
• LCU (Least Competent User) Usability Testing
• Web Usability - ALERT! Dominant Users and Focus Groups