1. Introduction

1.1. Making Web pages user-friendly

To make Web sites user-friendly, the primary thing to consider is optimizing Web pages. In his book of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (2000), Jakob Nielsen says, “fast response times are the most important design criterion for web pages.” The increasing size of digital media and limited bandwidth make it difficult for users to access Web pages.
The size of the Web page is determined by HTML files and any graphics, background images, included elements such as image, and JavaScript (.js), External Sheets (.css) and multimedia files such as sound, video, flash files in the page. By minimizing the amount of data that travels through the bandwidth, Web pages can be simple and loaded faster. Optimizing techniques make Web pages download faster and increase acceptability. According to Andrew B. King (2003, p. 5), it is important to make Web sites that people actually use and speed is a key component of usability, which helps determine sites acceptability.
Newbytes News Network analyzed that 50 percent of online transactions are aborted before their completion (May 11, 2001). The primary reason is poor Web performance. Users do not wait long and most users access the Internet at 56Kbps or less. Research of human factors has shown that “users will wait at most 8 to 10 seconds for a Web page to display” (Newsbytes, 2001). Eight to ten seconds for downloading means 30-40 Kbytes total in terms of page size at 56.6 Kbps bandwidth since 2Kbytes takes almost 1 second at 56.6 Kbps (Table 1). Nowadays the thresholds are becoming shorter. Web pages that violate this limit could lose intended users who do not wait for the pages to download.

1.2. History

After the birth of the Web, the online environment has been studied broadly. Network latency, a delay between requesting resources and receiving, is not always the same. “The more resources a page has (graphics, multimedia), the less predictable the response rate” (King, 2003, p. 8). HCI (Human-computer interaction) researchers studied the effects of fixed response times on user satisfaction and simulated variable response rate for more real-world results. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, researchers began to look at “Shackel’s likability” (Appendix A) dimension by studying “the effects of download delays on user perceptions of web sites, flow states and emotional appeal” (King, p. 8).
There are several ways for optimizing web pages, such as optimization by coding (HTML, DHTML) techniques, using simple graphical design, using cache. Search engine optimization and Web server (e.g. HTTP) optimization are usually handled outside of IA. So, this research paper mainly deals with optimization by markup coding and graphic design technique.