With the trend towards broadband I once considered that maybe we as web designers did not need to be so concerned about bandwidth as we once were. A site that is economical of bandwidth is relatively small and so is fast-loading. Everybody loves that.
This was especially important when everybody was on slow dial-up modems.
However, I still think we should always be concerned with conserving bandwidth. Reasons:
Users like me still on dialup modems (Yes, the dinosaurs are gone, but their relatives are still around)
Broadband connections can be less than 'broadband' at peak times
Broadband users like the extra 'snap' they get from a fast-loading page
Broadband users are sometimes limited in monthly bandwidth
Web page servers frequently restrict you both in site size (disk capacity) and daily or monthly bandwidth
Bandwidth is always going to be a scarce commodity -- so we should not waste it. With that in mind, the following series will cover ways you can economize on bandwidth:
Scaling images to reuse the same image in different sizes
