Dial-up growth is flat, if not falling. Broadband is "booming" according to recent reports, reaching almost 1 in 3 home users. Broadband users are the choicest demographic, too. Maybe it's time to be less concerned about download speeds, and add more leading-edge features to your Web site. Differentiate yourself from the growing horde of online competitors.

In the 90s, one of the biggest issues for Webmasters was making Web pages download quickly. Everyone was on a slow, dial-up modem connection, using an early Pentium machine, or worse. Shaving 500 bytes off a Web graphic was a noble deed.

Another big issue was avoiding Web page bells and whistles which would not reliably display on all computers, such as fancy graphics, streaming media, and more. Graphics were generally limited to a 216 color palette, and pixelation (jagged edges) was the norm.

Nowadays, things are very different.

Dial-up king AOL is shrinking, losing half a million - and growing - clients to broadband. Microsoft is flat-out dropping their strategy of targeting dial-up users for their MSN service, turning instead to hawking broadband. Why? That's where the market is going.

Pew Internet & America Life Project reports almost 1 in 3 of all US home internet users have broadband. eMarketer predicts more than 1 in 5 of all households in the US will have broadband by the end of this year. Strategy Analytics predicts 31 million US households will have broadband by the end of 2004, almost doubling to 56 million by 2008. Leichtman Research says cable and DSL broadband providers added almost 2 million new subscribers in the first three months of this year alone. Nielsen/NetRatings reports a 60% increase in broadband penetration in the last year, while dial-up usage dropped 10%. Regardless of the source, the numbers all point to a huge broadband audience that is growing dramatically.

Just as importantly, almost everyone now has a more powerful computer, which displays complicated web pages much faster and more reliably. IDC reports 46 million hot, new PCs were sold in the US market in 2001, and 48 million in 2002. Both Gartner and IDC predict an increase this year.

That's a ton of people using powerful computers, with an awful lot of them accessing the Internet over extremely fast connections. Web pages pop on screen. Movies start running within a few moments. Virtual tours are smooth and reliable. Downloading becomes convenient. Java starts running much quicker. Dynamic menus run effortlessly.

No wonder some of the most popular sites on the Web, which strive to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, serve Web pages with one - and sometimes more - ads based on, for example, Flash or DHTML (Dynamic HTML). They know the majority of their visitors can handle it. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Web ads are growing in size, weight, and numbers.

DoubleClick found that nearly 25 percent of the ads they served on behalf of all their clients were rich media (Flash, Java, DHTML, etc.), as of Q4 2002. They also reported rich media ads had click-through rates six times higher than traditional media. Consequently, rich media ads, particularly Flash, are now everywhere. Remember when adding Flash to your web site was somewhat controversial?

The Web has changed. It's more and more a place that appeals as much to broadband users as to traditional dial-up users. Maybe your site should, too.

Still not convinced? You'd be hard-pressed to ignore this fact: Broadband users are the choicest demographic on the Web. eMarketer reports they spend more time online, view twice as many Web pages, download more media, and shop and spend more at Web sites. Their incomes are higher, and they're more educated. Indeed, such a demographic might cause one to focus on these individuals. That's exactly what Microsoft is doing.

What does it all mean?

You can add more stuff to your Web pages, without having to worry so much about visitors hitting the back button because the download is too long. Or because the cool feature didn't work for them.

Actually, it might be essential to add more sophisticated features to your site, in order to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

What features can you add to your site? Larger, more colorful graphics; Larger, sharper photos - and more of them; Flash and Flash MX graphics and movies; dynamic javascript menus and other client-side scripts like slide-shows; client side Java; downloads of Adobe PDFs, word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations; virtual tours of all shapes and sizes; and regular or streaming audio and video.

Did you know Arbitron found that over 103 million Americans over the age of 12 have experienced Web audio or video - one in five in the last month? That is quite an audience.

But don't go hog wild. Bells and whistles are nice, but users are searching for information. Realty Times. All Rights Reserved.

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