RE: UKNM: You have 8 seconds

[Robin Edwards]

On Friday, July 09, 1999 3:14 PM, Clay Shirky [SMTP:

clayshirky [dot] com

] wrote:

> "e-Tailers beware: one third of online shoppers waiting for web pages

> to down-load will "bailout" after only eight seconds.  This could cost

> web merchants as much as $4.35 billion in lost e-commerce sales this

> year, according to a newly released study by Zona Research."


This sort of seems to make sense, although 8 seconds seems staggeringly short - 

particularly for a 14.4k modem user as suggested in the article. That 

represents about 14k of data - not a lot really, in fact about the size of an 

animated banner advert, that so many retailers like to plaster on their own web 

sites ("click here for our stuff").


As an example, the home page at http://www.amazon.co.uk currently totals just 

over 62k (so about 35 seconds for our 14.4k friends) and most people seem to 

agree that Amazon know what they're doing.


The big question is, can all elements of effectiveness and trustworthiness be 

communicated in 14k of data, or do you run the risk of losing sales as a result 

of trying to squeeze everything into 14k? If you lose a third because your page 

is too big, but triple your conversion rate because your site is more 

effectively designed, you are better off (although that 1/3 may never return, 

even when they upgrade to faster modems). Either way, this study does highlight 

the need to think about reducing page download times, which is something that 

many have glossed over a bit since they upgraded to leased lines and ISDN.


Does anyone remember using the web back in '93 with a 9600 baud modem? You had 

to wait for the whole page to download before you saw any content at all. In 

those days you begged for a page to be text only!


Robin

--

Robin Edwards

Clockworx Design Limited

T: +44 1543 252370           F: +44 1543 420761

E:

robinclockworx [dot] co [dot] uk

     W: http://www.clockworx.co.uk/ 

********************

UKNM is sponsored by Excite UK, visit us at http://www.excite.co.uk.

Email Khalil Ibrahimi

khalilexcitecorp [dot] com (mailto:khalilexcitecorp [dot] com)

 to advertise on Excite.

********************

Change your UKNM subscription use http://www.chinwag.com/uknm.html