Not long ago I got an email message from a very happy client for whom I’d done a standards-based reimagination of an updated design they had been working on for their Web site.

Your template is 70-80% smaller than what we originally gave you to work with, and about 60% smaller than our old template despite the fact that the new template has more functionality.

• Our current template: 60.6 KB total download, 25.8 KB HTML assuming CSS and images are cached
• New template, version from previous designer: 117.6 KB total, 29.1 KB HTML
• New template, version from you: 23.2 KB total, 8.6 KB HTML

Come on! I mean, do I even need to say anything more?