m u s i n g s

Remember the heady days of the early internet with dogma-like preaching such as ... optimize your images, make your pages load quickly, program for the lowest common denominator and so on and so forth? We could use a refresher.

I was fascinated over the last year or so of the general slow down in web site loading times, especially the news sites - Globe & Mail, Star, Mashable to name a few.
I tried a small experiment. Three computers, four browsers and found out that on these sites, and others, the load time is like 15 - 30 seconds. In some cases a lot longer, or not at all. WTF?

It is a seemingly common occurrence when I click on a link to a news story the page attempts to find all the appropriate ad servers and just keeps chugging along until they are served up. In this "backyard research" I timed the Star and The Globe. The Star won at 35 seconds to load an article and the dozen or so ads. It is worse when there is a video clip embedded, but that is a whole different rant!

If I was not playing around and doing this research, I would wait for about 5 seconds and say ... Nyet.

This has to be addressed. User Experience states categorically that an online Brand is, in fact, the user's experience with the site. In some of these cases it is a non-experience.

Whether it is overload on the ad servers, confusion in the code that serves up the ad widgets or all the gobble-de-gook that is tagged onto an ad, this is simply unacceptable.

Now, for the record, I am on a 20 MB high speed DSL, three fast computers and they are all set up properly. There is nothing on my systems slowing down the serving of web pages (pop-up blockers, cookies shut off etc etc). I also know because in these tests I went to a dozen or so other pages at random (not cached) that I have never been to, some corporate, some media and others - they all loaded immediately.

I think it would bode well for the large media sites to have a look at this issue, surely the advertisers would respond well to the serving up of their ads in a timely fashion, as opposed to users just leaving in frustration.

Posted via email from mose's posterous