Is your ecommerce site a breeze to use? Is it fast to download? Does it render (paint) quickly on the screen? If not, is the HTML at least built to display the most important parts of the page first?

You can trim precious seconds off the download time by removing superfluous HTML code, optimizing your images, and converting any tables-based layouts to CSS-based (Cascading Style Sheets) instead. Especially ditch any nested tables. Superfluous code includes such things as programmer comments, commented-out copy/code, redundant font tags, inline JavaScripts and inline CSS. The latter two can, in most cases, be moved to a .JS file and .CSS file, respectively. MS FrontPage is notorious for adding 'code bloat' to your pages. Optimizing your images for fast download includes not just choosing the best compression format and compressing them to the largest extent possible (using Photoshop, Fireworks, or whatever your tool of choice is) without noticeable degradation in the image quality, but also defining height and width attributes on all your images. And if you're still using 1-pixel GIFs as placeholders to align things on your pages, it's time to leave that technique where it belongs... in the '90s! A tool like Dr. Watson or NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox can also help you in your HTML streamlining efforts.

It's no secret that even the most laid-back of individual, when online, transforms into a demanding and impatient web surfer. Nothing aggravates them more than a slow or unresponsive web site. For example, a 30 second Flash intro can elicit the electronic equivalent to road rage. Unsurprisingly, the longer you make your visitor wait, the more likely that they will abandon your site, as this survey data from eMarketer attests to:

Got a bloated website and want to know what to do about it? MarketingExperiments.com has 10 great tips to reduce download time. Their advice includes such gems as:

• define height and width attributes on all your images,
• streamline your HTML code with a tool like Dr. Watson,
• don't nest tables,
• employ CSS for layout (instead of tables!), and
• compress images with a tool like Image Compressor.