Characterizing Home Pages

摘要

Home pages are very important for any successful web sites because they give users the first look. A good home page attracts more hits, which means more chances for e-business. This paper investigates the home pages of 95 popular web sites given by PC Magazine. We present a broad range of statistics pertaining to these pages, including: page size, embedded object type and size distributions, dynamic references and ad banners, response time, etc. We also examine how a browser downloads the home page and the embedded objects referenced by the page. Our measurements show that the mean size of the home page is 32KB, 83% of the home pages make use of Java scripts, and 84% of them at least have a reference to dynamic objects such as asp, CGI, Servlet or JSP. Only 2% of the home pages have more than 50 embedded objects, and 89% of the embedded objects are image files. The average response time is less than 4 seconds for 90% home pages, while it takes up to 10 seconds to transfer some dynamic ad banners and web cached image files.