{"id":267,"date":"2013-06-13T05:23:51","date_gmt":"2013-06-13T05:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/?p=267"},"modified":"2013-06-20T07:31:06","modified_gmt":"2013-06-20T07:31:06","slug":"after-trying-to-conserve-bandwidth-for-a-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/2013\/06\/13\/after-trying-to-conserve-bandwidth-for-a-week\/","title":{"rendered":"After trying to conserve bandwidth for a few days …."},"content":{"rendered":"

I looked around for help on slowing down the speed at which I was eating up my monthly allotment of bandwidth<\/a>, and found that many other people have tread this path before. Here is one pretty nice reference at Million Clues<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As various references suggested, I switched to FireFox, and installed two Add-ons, AdBlock Plus<\/a>, and ImgLikeOpera<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I don’t have any scientific proof that this has reduced my bandwidth consumption, but I can certainly see that both banner ads (AdBlock Plus), and images (ImgLikeOpera) are not fetched.\u00a0\u00a0 Pages are loading faster.<\/p>\n

ImgLikeOpera has the more significant impact on my user experience.\u00a0 I have set it to block all images by default.\u00a0\u00a0 It has been interesting going about my business on the web without any images.\u00a0\u00a0 Some types of sites accommodate the missing images much better than others.<\/p>\n

EspnCricinfo<\/a> looks bad without images.\u00a0 They use images for backgrounds of menus, without the background image, the menu items simply get mixed up with the other text.<\/p>\n

Shopping sites were hard to deal with, which I suppose is natural.\u00a0 After about 10 minutes on the Croma<\/a> site, I gave up and turned on all images.\u00a0\u00a0 Large shopping sites like Zappos, and Amazon, will not work very well on low bandwidth.\u00a0\u00a0 On the other hand, I imagine that their mobile sites are designed with bandwidth constraints in mind.<\/p>\n

News sites did much better.\u00a0\u00a0 The New York Times<\/a> site was lovely.\u00a0 Without images it continued to look very familiar.\u00a0\u00a0 Missing images were clearly marked, and stayed out of the way of the text.\u00a0 The text itself was in exactly the same places that it always is. \u00a0Washington Post<\/a> was a little uneven.\u00a0 Talking Points Memo<\/a> was clean.\u00a0\u00a0 Political Wire<\/a> never has news images, and isn’t that a nice decision.<\/p>\n

I have a renewed appreciation for the tech and design folks at the New York Times.\u00a0\u00a0 They probably wouldn’t even hire me as a janitor.<\/p>\n

Facebook was interesting.\u00a0\u00a0 At first, it was very hard to use with all images turned off. \u00a0 After a couple of days, it is beginning to feel natural.\u00a0 I guess the brain adjusts.\u00a0 It gets used to the visual cues that the images provide.\u00a0\u00a0 After a couple of days without images, you begin to learn the cues that the other content provides.<\/p>\n

I have deliberately stayed away from many of the Indian sites. \u00a0 My experience these past few weeks at these sites has not been very pleasant. \u00a0 Their attention to user experience, to put it mildly, is uneven. \u00a0 Dedicated E-commerce sites (FlipKart<\/a>, InfiBeam<\/a>, SnapDeal<\/a>, etc.) have been generally much better than enterprise sites (Tamil Nadu Electricity Board<\/a>, Tata Docomo<\/a>, Karur Vysya Bank<\/a>, etc.).<\/p>\n

This is all very interesting. \u00a0I have never had to take available band-width into account when coming up the design for a web UI. \u00a0 I wonder how seriously this is addressed by developers who cater to folks in the first world. \u00a0 However, everybody is moving towards ‘mobile design first’. \u00a0 One of the basic constraints of that world, is limited bandwidth. \u00a0Decisions made for the mobile design will bleed into the desktop, and that will address bandwidth shortage in a natural manner, I expect.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I looked around for help on slowing down the speed at which I was eating up my monthly allotment of bandwidth, and found that many other people have tread this path before. Here is one pretty nice reference at Million Clues. As various references suggested, I switched to FireFox, and installed two Add-ons, AdBlock Plus, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,5],"tags":[20,14,18,19],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions\/269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}