Loading times are unavoidable. There are some tricks as to minimize them, but still there will be some seconds left when your visitor can see nothing but a nearly empty screen. - "Empty"? - Well, this articles deals with some knacks you can use to avoid that impression.
Your visitors should have interesting text to read from the very beginning. If there are images with WIDTH="..." and HEIGHT="...", that's not really disturbing. But the visitors notice there is still something missing.
You can hide that fact by having only navigation bar, text and built-in graphics at top of a page. If images are needed, you should try to arrange them lower down on your page. Thus it's being loaded while your visitors are still reading somewhere near the top. When they are coming down on the screen, scrolling to the lower parts of the page, the image will (ideally) be loaded already. - And you have once more created an impression of a "virtually instantly loaded" web site.
2. Keep Your Text LegibleIt seems too self-evident - so I was not sure at first if I should mention it here at all. Though I found an amazing number of web sites with text in any dark color, printed on black background. Or small light-blue text on white background. And many other ways of disfigured text whose only remarkable attribute was that it was hard to read. (Or can you imagine anything that might be a good reason for such a deterrent to a visitor? The only thing that comes to my mind is - they simply designed their web site thoughtlessly!)
3. Use BODY tag with "TOPMARGIN=... BOTTOMMARGIN=... LEFTMARGIN=... RIGHTMARGIN=..."Another trifle to help the visitors feel comfortable at your web site are the following attributes in the <BODY> tag of your pages:
<BODY TOPMARGIN=... BOTTOMMARGIN=... LEFTMARGIN=... RIGHTMARGIN=...>Thus you are telling the browser to arrange the content not fully from top to bottom, from left to right of the page, but to leave a margin. Consequently, the type area can be grasped at a glance, the content is easier to read.