|
Articles Archive
Articles Index
Waiting For The Web Doors To Open
by Joe Erbacher
You rush down to a local store to pick up a few last-minute
items. A sign on the door says "Please Press Button and Wait
for the Door to Open", so you press the button. Then you wait.
Five minutes later, the door finally opens.
How many people do you suppose would become frustrated during
this wait? And how many will just give up and leave?
Well, this is exactly the kind of frustration you are asking
visitors to your Web site to endure when you expect them to
wait five minutes for your Web doors to open.
Earlier this year, I surveyed 300 Internet users to find out
how long they are willing to wait for the first page of a Web
site to load.
When accessing a site they had never before visited, 62% of
the respondents said they felt frustrated if the first page
didn't load within 30 seconds; 34.3% claimed they would give
up and go elsewhere if the page hasn't loaded in that time.
After a full minute has passed, 65.3% will be gone from the
site--many of them never to return.
Businesses of every ilk are shifting more and more of their
resources onto the Internet. They set up Web sites, publicize
them, and get ready to service their new online customers.
Many of them then proceed to discourage visitors from entering
their sites by greeting them with pages that are exasperatingly
slow.
Not all companies, of course, still live in the dark ages of
1997. Last year, The Boston Globe announced that it was
listening to its customers and redesigning its site so that
it loaded more quickly. They removed the frames and large
graphic images. And several of the major search engines load
much faster today than they did a year or two ago. These
companies have obviously gotten the message.
A number of the Web sites I've had an opportunity to review
were able to have their download times cut in half without
impacting the appearance of the sites or the quality of their
graphics. The only thing needed was an image editor.
Some sites can actually be speeded up by an order of magnitude
by designing smaller, more-sensible images--and by removing
frames and useless Java applets. Others still don't make use
of the image attributes that will allow the text to appear
while the images are loading.
One respondent to our survey summed up the feelings of many:
"I can't believe that these alleged professional sites take
longer and longer to load....Too much junk that is nothing
more than bells and whistles. Too many people don't know
how to code HTML so that at least something comes up within
5 seconds." Another was even more succinct: "I want speed,
not unneeded graphics."
Keynote Systems, a company that does Internet performance
measurements, released in December its Web Brokerage Index
which rates the Web sites of twenty stock brokers according
to performance and availability. The best performer was Web
Street (with an average download time of 2.97 seconds), and
the worst was Charles Schwab (at 26.7 seconds). There's that
order-of-magnitude difference I mentioned.
What's the bottom line? When the front door to a Web site
takes too long to open, prospects and customers will flee,
resulting in lost sales and earnings for the siteowner.
It's a simple, closed-door case.
# # #
Joe Erbacher is president of P. Zazz Marketing Corporation,
a company that specializes in Web-site design and Internet
marketing. Details of the survey mentioned in this article
can be found on his Web site at www.zazz.com.
Articles Index
|
|
FREE
Download Now
More Info
|
FREE Ebooks!
Distribute them "as is" or customize them with your own URL and information!
More Info
|
Quality Product
Reprint Rights
1/2 OFF Prices!
Building Your Own Adsense Fortune
Retail Price - $97
VIP Bonus Price
$17.00
Includes MASTER
Reprint Rights!
More Info
Other Specials
|
More Info |
More Info |
More Info
|
Create SECURE encrypted PayPal buttons right from your desktop! Quality software that provides SO much convenience you'll wonder how you ever got by without it.
Special VIP Discount!
Click here for more info
|
|
