If you plan to design a website, and are currently using a dial-up connection, there are a number of things to keep in mind. Apart from establishing the criteria for the look and functionality you want for your site, consider these ten design tips as well:

1. Keep it Small – You want your pages to load faster, and the best way to do that is to keep the page file size down to a minimum. Don’t load too much data on the home page. No one likes to wait around for a page to load.
2. Use a Site Map – A site map allows both you and the user to navigate within the site without having to search sequentially through a lot of pages. It’ll make life easier for you while you’re building it, and for the visitor.
3. Use Style Sheets – Style sheets are like templates that allow you to make changes uniformly across the entire site, while maintaining a consistent look throughout. This will alleviate the need to load individual pages that you want to edit.
4. Short Cuts – As with style sheets, short cuts used in your HTML code will propagate across your entire website when entered for a single page. Again, you don’t want to have to repeat every command or file for each individual page.
5. Avoid Large Image Files – Unless your site is geared toward graphics, photography or the like, try to keep your image files under 20K. Anything larger is apt to slow your load time beyond the patience of the average visitor.
6. Stay Consistent in Design – The more you use the same features on each page, such as headers or logos, the more you can take advantage of the browser’s cache memory to re-load the pages more quickly.
7. Keep Your Audience in Mind – By this we mean that you don’t need to be overly conscious of slow load speeds that you may be experiencing if you anticipate that only a small percentage of your target viewers will themselves be connecting via dial-up. Research via Google Analytics or a similar service, if practical, and check the numbers. It could be more detrimental to the success of your website to pare it down unnecessarily, than to leave the features in that are increasing the load time.
8. Keep Pages Short – Once again we’re going for speed and conciseness. A page should be able to present its full contents without the need to scroll.
9. Avoid Embedded or Auto-play Audio – Apart from being annoying (and potentially job-threatening for those who are surfing at work), it slows down the page load.
10. Put Yourself in the Visitor’s Shoes – Follow the site’s links and/or site map and gauge the load speeds and ease of navigating the site. It should feel smooth and intuitive. Enlist the aid of a friend if necessary in order to get some objective feedback.