When sitting down to start thinking about the look and feel of your blog, you need to ponder who you are designing for. Just because you have some super fast fiber optic cable to your house, doesn’t mean John in the middle of the woods does. There are still people on dial-up access in this world, and they still make up approximately 3% of most web sites traffic.

So do you design with them in mind? In a way, yes. I still optimize all images for my sites for 56k modems. It just compresses them and makes them easier to load with no real lose of quality. It’s a small thing, and puts less stress on your server anyway. That’s just one small thing, but make sure anytime you add something flashy to your site, ask yourself two questions: Does it add any real value and will it make it harder for people on slower connections to use my site? Just because something is pretty, it doesn’t mean it belongs on your blog.

It may seem silly to design with the dial-up customers, but can you really afford to turn 3% of people away from your business?