With the increase in use of broadband by consumers and the talk of video on demand, etc., I have the feeling that some people building websites are taking the whole streaming thing too much from granted. And, also, assuming that all their users have broadband in the first place. Two thoughts to go along with this:

Reach

Last week I was in Pervolia, Cyprus, and had to access the web through my mobile phone connection. To keep the costs down and the speed up, I turned the graphics off in my Firefox. I was amazed at how many websites I couldn’t use because graphics were being used as navigation with no ‘alt’ text behind them. If I can’t see them, what chance has a search engine spider got of making sense of these websites?

Overload

We are working on a project for a client where they have requested a video on a page to automatically run. This means two negative things for them:

1. The person viewing the website has an unnecessary element, a video, forced on them - 6mb in size.
2. Their website becomes slower, delivering a web page just over 6mb in size and this eats up their bandwidth allowance.

Sometimes, it’s just the information that people want. Sometimes, the bells and whistles get in the way.