The biggest factor in user satisfaction is speed of response. Optimising your website for response speed means people will use it more.

But it's more important than that. The number of Internet users in developing countries is rapidly growing. These users could access an increasing amount of valuable information. Yet internet connections can be slow and expensive in the developing world. If a site takes too long to load it becomes unusable.

As broadband speeds increase in the developed world, website designers are forgetting the lessons of optimisation. By allowing websites to become bloated we make our sites unusable in many parts of the world.

We believe that optimised, efficient web design is important for global development and is a moral imperative. This is entirely achievable without compromising website design. We wrote the Low Bandwidth Web Design Guidelines to show how.

INASP focus on the accessibility of scientific information. With their collaboration and financial support we created the web design guidelines to support publishers of on-line resources to better meet the needs of their audience in developing countries.

The guidelines are for publishers, web site developers, NGOs and anyone who wants to have their content accessible in a global context.

The guidelines were researched and written collaboratively by the Aptivate team with regular feedback from our partner organisation INASP. We drew on a number of online and offline resources, our own experience and experts in the field.