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:

Visitor Abandonment
Page Load Time	Percent of Users Continuing to Wait
10 seconds	84%
15 seconds	51%
20 seconds	26%
30 seconds	5%

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.