By Stephen Manes

s it me? Is it my modem? Is it my service provider? I don't think so, because I know I'm not the only one who thinks everything about the World Wide Web is getting slower. And why shouldn't it be slipping? Given the Web's architecture, there are so many opportunities for virtual bottlenecks, it's a wonder the thing works at all as it scales up in a commercial frenzy. But many sites contribute to the frustration instead of minimize it.

All I wanted was some detailed information about some real bottlenecks for a drive to the airport, since I knew there was a lot of summer construction on the route. I also knew the Washington State Department of Transportation had a terrific site, complete with real-time traffic-flow maps and pictures from robotic cameras. Unfortunately, we were leaving from a friend's house where my personal bookmarks were unavailable, and I couldn't remember the right URL.

Somehow, I did remember that Microsoft puts much of the traffic information on its Sidewalk site. I managed to navigate to the proper place, called up the map, and waited. And waited some more. And then some more.

Microsoft delivers the map in Java, and at that peak Sunday evening hour, the applet was taking its own sweet time to load. I gave up without success; by the time I managed to bypass the Net traffic, I could have been at the airport.

In off-peak hours, I returned to the two sites on my own machine and did a comparison test. Sidewalk's Java applet, I discovered, mostly got in the way. The Washington State site whose URL I was unable to remember (hey, see how long you remember www.wsdot.wash. gov!) delivered more information faster, with bigger, better pictures to boot.

It's not yet entirely clear to me what people really want from their dial-up connections, but one likely candidate is information. Maybe I'm wrong, but I find it hard to believe that people are looking for a long wait for meaningless graphics that jitter across the screen. It seems Web developers are throwing so many gimcracks, gizmos, and doodads into their pages that the idea of getting information in a hurry has taken a backseat to giving presentations in a flurry.

Developers should be strapped to their chairs and forced to endure their sites over a standard 28.8-Kbps connection from the moment of dial-up. Just getting logged in nowadays can be a real hassle. America Online's much-maligned problems are far from the only ones. Here in Seattle, for example, the Microsoft Network is often busy. When you do get through, the throughput can be abysmal. A shortage of modems on the front end and insufficient bandwidth to serve those modems on the back end is the rule, not the exception, because flat-fee pricing offers the provider no incentive to provide anything better. So when you finally do get to a particular page, the last thing you need is an endless wait for an underpowered server bent on delivering huge graphics with no reason for being except some hip soul's design sense.

Some of these designs undoubtedly are spawned by the fast workstations and internal network connections used by developers. Their attitude is often, "Doesn't everybody have this stuff?" No, everybody doesn't. Web developers rarely seem to check what might happen if their systems, against all odds, suddenly turn popular. One predictable result is the "server busy" responses one often gets.

Good Web-site design is not about hip looks. It's really about organization, searchability, dependability, and security-and the ability to avoid wasting the user's time in a world where bandwidth is almost always inadequate.

Stephen Manes has been writing about PCs and their frustrated users for 15 years. He sometimes answers mail sent to him at smanes@compuserve.com .

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