I was observing Michael Brennan as he opened up greatlakesmonitoring.org on his laptop, though this will apply to all GEOD projects. He had a slow connection, and when the page initially loaded, the footer was up close to the header, and the rest of the page did not fill for 5-10 seconds. I initially thought that there was a bug in the code, and then the data popped in.

There are a couple things we can do to communicate this to the user:

• We should "placehold" the layout. This should be easy enough, and we could set a minimum height until the data comes back.
• A loading spinner would go a long way here. It could probably be the first thing that you see in the placeholder layout.