Check your Blog health with BMI (Body Mass Index)

Just like body mass index (BMI) has been the medical standard for obesity measurement of human beings, we will apply similar technique for comparing and analysing the health of blogs and websites.

In medical terms, BMI is equal to the weight, divided by the square of the height. Typically, the weight is in kilograms and the height in metres. For calculating the BMI of blogs or websites, we will put the weight in bytes (b) and instead of using just height, we will use webpage area (height x width) measured in pixels (px). The unit of Blog BMI therefore will be b/px²

To calculate you webpage size (or weight), save the entire page with images, css, javascripts, flash and other elements in a new folder. The size of this folder is roughly the weight of your webpage. (remember, 1 kb = 1,024 bytes) - You can use this excellent Web Page Analyzer service to calculate weight of your entire website or individual webpages.

Calculating the webpage area is a little tricky. You can either download a screen ruler or use a commercial software like Dreamweaver or Golive to view your webpage dimensions.

Now that you have calculated your BMI, let us match it with the right category and what that means?

Underweight: (lower BMI) - Either lot of content (area) or no content (size) - Limit the content of the page and if more content needs to be added, move it to a new web page. Make sure that the important content of the webpage lies within the top 600x600 viewable area without scrolling. The page height should not be any more than 4 scroll lengths. Oversized web pages become unreadable on smaller monitors. The majority of surfers now have 800 x 600 or larger monitors *.

Ideal: 0.064 Congratulations for creating a good site layout, your website will load faster and majority of surfers will see your site the way you designed it.

Overweight: >= 0.1 (higher BMI) - Lot of people in this world still use the 56K modem to access the internet *. A large webpage means slower loading times. Limit use of elements that increase the webpage size like graphics, Flash animations or big CSS files. The rough target for page size should be below 35K for at least the cover page. As a general rule of thumb, a visitor will leave your site if the loading time is more than 8 secs.