Web Studio 3 will tell you how large your pages are and how long visitors to your pages will have to wait while you pages download to their browser.

Right click on the background of any of your pages and choose Page Properties from the resulting menu. Click on the Size & Download Time tab in the dialog. WebStudio will then create the HTML for the page and give you the results.

First you’ll see the size of the page in kilobytes, or thousands of bytes. You’ll want this number to be as low as you can make it, with an upper limit of about 100k. You’ll see why in the list of Download times below the Page’s file size in the dialog.

The Page’s Download Times are given for various type of internet connections. Remember this is your visitor’s internet connection, not yours! If you have about 100k on a page, it will take about 1 second to download with high speed internet such as cable, DSL or a T1 line. With an ISDN line it takes about 11 seconds. With a 56k modem, which is what most people have, it will take 15 seconds to download your entire page. How long do you wait when you go to pages that are slow to load?

If you have a large page, what can you do? Sounds are usually the largest thing on a page. Use sounds sparingly. Graphics are next on the “big” list. Use smaller graphics, like 300 X 200 maximum size. You’ll be able to put about eight graphics of that size on a 100k page. If you want to put more than eight graphics of that size on a page, consider using Thumbnails from the Special FX gallery. What about text? Don’t worry about text, it has the least effect on page size. Whatever you do, don’t use a full page graphic as a background for you page, it will take forever to download, and no one will stay to see your site!

Now you have some tools to help you minimize your download times and keep visitors on your site.