In response to the recent Parks Associates study that said that around one fifth of American heads-of-households had never used email, the Next Web Blog put up a post with some comments from Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels.

Amazon focuses on keeping prices low, and so naturally attracts lower income individuals. Vogels said Amazon designs their site so that it’s accessible from slow connections, old computers and small monitors. For Vogels it’s important to make sure as many customers can use the site as possible.

As a web developer, I get excited about the newest tech, gadgets, and the best looking websites. It’s difficult to build software and web sites that both harness the best parts of interactive javascript and aesthetics and not disenfranchise the web surfers that are not up to date with their hardware and software.

A report from WebSiteOptimization.com shows that websites have ballooned in size over the past few years. Between 2003 and 2008 the average web page size has grown from 93.1 kilobytes to 312 kilobytes. For people with decent broadband connections 312 kilobytes is drop in the bucket, but for those with slow DSL or, god forbid, dial-up connections, 312 kilobytes will take an eternity to load.

The same site has another report showing that around 12 percent of web users are still hanging on to their dial-up connections.

If the average website takes around 45 seconds (312 kilobytes at dial-up speed) to load on a dial-up connection, is it actually possible to use the web?