Many educators surf the Web on high speed connections provided by their educational institutions. These kinds of connections are a luxury, however, when it comes to students and teachers at home. And, according to the best estimates, it will be years before fast Internet connections will be commonplace. With that in mind, it pays to be careful how big your home (and other pages) are and how fast they load at, for example 28.8 modem speed. Yahoo, the most popular site on the Web, loads in 7.5 seconds at 28.8. How do you rate?

Get Educated: Optimizing Resources

One of the better tools I've seen is the NetMechanic site. Here, you can test your page load time, optimize your graphics, and check for html errors. Another good starting point is at Webreference's Optimizing Web Graphics page. While there, check out their links to tricks on HTML optimization as well. Remember that bandwidth on the Internet is a shared resource. We will all get at the content we want much faster if our Web pages are optimized!