Getting the Content up to Speed

摘要

If everybody believes your econtent is the best thing on the Web, people will go to your site no matter how long it takes or how inconvenient you make it. If you are in this rar-ified position, you don't need to read this column ― but do you really exist? For everyone else, and particularly for every econtent site with competitors or plausible alternatives, speed matters. A lot. When I studied home pages of the 2002 EContent 100 ["The Good, the Slow, And the Flashy: Looking at EContent 100 Sites," EContent, April 2003, pp 48-49], load time was one of ten objective measures. Six sites took more than 54 seconds to load on a full 52Kbps connection, and only three sites loaded in five seconds or less, with another seven loading in less than ten seconds. Since I graded the "Watch Out!" sites as well, that means that 91% of the sites took at least ten seconds to load. That's long enough for many of us to lose interest. Similar studies of PC Magazine's "Top 100 Classics" and "Top 100 Undiscovered Sites" of 2002 yielded similar results: 90 to 95% of the sites took ten seconds or longer, with far too many taking close to a minute. Don't get me wrong, econtent sites aren't much worse than other major sites, but fitting in with mediocrity isn't much of a boast. Based on what I've seen, I don't believe that Webmasters for commercial sites view speed as a priority. They should.