Why is it important to send a confirmation email? Well, you had someone visit your site and actually do something. He took time to fill out a form, do a survey or sign your guest book. I personally think it's great to send him a quick thank you note. Also, it's a great way to include a quick advertisement or two (don't overdo it).

The main purpose, however, is to remind him about your site. The guy or gal is surfing web and stumbles on your site. He likes it so leaves a guest book entry telling you it's great, then surfs other sites for another hour. He's forgotten about you and may never return.

Except that when he opens up his email he'll have a quick email thanking him for his guest book entry and reminding him about some services that you offer. Now he remembers your site and perhaps returns. That's main purpose ... follow-up. Give them a chance to return. And those are best visitors of all, ones that keep coming back.

Fortunately, although there are some things outside your control, here are 15 things you can do to make your pages appear as quickly as possible:

~~~~ Graphics ~~~~

Re-size every image to size it will appear on page. Don't use WIDTH and HEIGHT tags in your html to shrink a large image.

Compare file size when saved as GIF and JPG - results may surprise you.

For GIF files, experiment with reducing number of colors in image.

For JPG files, experiment with different image quality settings.

Save files at a maximum 96 dots per inch - any more is wasted on a monitor.

~~~~ Page Design ~~~~

Include pixel WIDTH and HEIGHT settings in IMG SRC tags.

Give pixel width settings for TABLE elements and HR rules rather than percentages.

Don't use many different background images within TABLE or TD elements.

Try not to nest TABLES within TABLES.

Use embedded (not external) CSS style sheets to minimise size and frequency of complex FONT descriptions.

Minimize number of different files making up page.

Reduce your dependency on outsourced elements such as counters, graphics, javascript, and so on where speed of 3rd party service may be suspect.

~~~~ Editing HTML ~~~~

Editors such as FrontPage produce very bloated html files, with a lot of uneccessary duplication. Go through file with a text editor looking for repetition (most commonly of FONT tags) that can be removed.

Remove any non-essential text such as comments.

StartBlaze pages aren't designed to be indexed by search engines, so you don't need page elements like META keyword and description tags.

Prune and tune your pages until they are mean and lean and you can be confident that every time your page comes out of StartBlaze database - someone will actually see it.

And making your page *visible* is first critical step to creating desired actions from StartBlaze. Now you only need to worry about what you say on page - but that's a subject for another article ...