Adding a "low bandwidth" and "high bandwidth" link to your website.

I am currently researching on how other websites have implemented a low and high bandwidth link for their visitors.

One thing that I am a little unsure of is, what actually defines a low or high bandwidth site?

I found this link: http://www.aptivate.org/webguidelines/TopTen.html. But I’m not sure if it’s out of date or not. Does anyone have any useful resources I could take a look at?

I have applied the CSS style switcher method found here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alternate/. But ever since I’ve done that, the page loads kind of ’broken apart’ and then jumps into place. Any alternative scripts/methods?


Thanks in advance!
Sarah

Oh, btw, I’m using Revo.

I happened upon CSS switcher at http://modx.com/extras/package/cssswitcher but I saw that it’s made pre-Revo, so I didn’t even have a go using that.

I don’t know that I would worry about that at this point in time. The 25kb limit? I would say is null and void. If you go on most larger sites nowadays, the graphics, javascript and other data may run from 200kb - 500kb, at times even higher. What this means is that the few people that are still using dial-up are probably browsing the internet with images turned off. Instead of worrying about 2 different versions (which could run you into trouble with Google or other search engines because of duplicate content), I would worry more about how your site looks with images turned off. Make sure the site is still accessible and looks pretty good. It won’t be perfect, but then anyone that surfs with images turned off will be used to that. Just my 2 cents...

Hi goonz,

It sounds like I’ll have to do more research into our target audience (our client caters to farmers out in the country) and see if they happen to use the web with images on or off. Just a side note, the website would look horrible with images turned off! Haha. Not my problem. I didn’t design it.

The site is pretty light as it is already (text page is 120 KB, image-heavy page is 500 KB), but I just wanted to do some research before going back to the client and suggesting that they bypass that whole ’lo/high’ idea.

Thanks for your two cents!

Oh and also,

good point about the duplicate content. The two CSS style sheets are nearly identical except for a few elements.

Target audience farmers out in the country? They are the ones most likely to be running dialup, so far as I know. I brought up a point I saw in a Build conference video earlier, you may be able to do further research online. Video link is below, point I mentioned about 6:18 into the vid.
http://vimeo.com/17091905


And the duplicate content doesn’t have to do with the CSS, but with the content itself. If the page is being served hi or lo as ’example-page-name.html’ no matter what, then disregard what I said about duplicate content.

Hi again,

Thanks so much for that video. It has heaps of information. I’m going to have to watch the rest of that when I get home!

K the rest of the videos from that Build conference are great also, especially Frank Chimero.