On Thu, 14 Mar 2002 13:04:15 -0000, Steven Heywood
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Business studies have shown that you lose about 50% of your potential
>audience after 20 seconds' wait for a page to load and 90% after a minute.
Those are scary figures, but they reflect what I suspected. I can see from
the logs of a number of my pages how long it takes a user to download it
and how may of them complete the process or bail out.
>In order to keep hold of your potential customers it's probably good policy
>to "keep it small and keep it quick" and if they do have to wait for part
of
>the page to load it's probably an idea to make sure there's something else
>there to keep them occupied, like some useful text, in the mean time.
Absolutly, any final system would probably take advantage of the home page
to load active content in the background so that it would be ready by the
time the user moved on to any dynamic pages.
>We can't assume that everyone's going to have big, posh machines and nice,
>fast lines. Why limit our customer base unnecessarily?
It was a luxury I was able to assume for the pilot, but I agree completly.
With a little testing it is posible to determine what the users machine is
capable of and then deliver content that is appropriate, or give the user
the choice between low and high bandwidth alternatives.
James
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