It's an important question, given that university home pages are visited millions of times a year by hundreds of thousands of alumni, prospective students, and current students, faculty, researchers, and staff. For example, the BU home page was visited 1,723,118 times in 1997. And visits in 1998 are running double that figure. Pages load in fractions of a second. A large percentage of those visitors are dialing up over a 28.8 modem.
Pages take much longer to display.
I visited about 50 university Webs, measured the size of their home page, and calculated the time it takes to display their page over a 28.8 modem. Some day, we will all have fast cable modems in our homes and the size of a Web page will be of no concern. Until then, Networked Information Services will pay close attention to page size and display time whenever it develops new pages or remodels existing ones. I encourage all Web designers at BU to do the same.