 |
||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|||
Is your Web site too hard to download? Some Fortune 500
companies are paying as much as $1.5 million a year to operate a Web site. And many of them are spending that money on sites cluttered with frames, thick background graphics and useless images that do nothing but bounce
and flash, all of which makes sites dangerously slow to visit. According to NetCount, as many as 80 per cent of surfers tune out when pages freeze their browsers. As NetCount chairman Paul Grand told
Entertainment Weekly, "If it's a really snazzy site, but nobody ever sees it because the content takes too long to download, give it an award for content and design, but not for function." This
frustration may be why the growth rate for Web use is slowing. Yankelovich Partners found that 1996 surfers spent 12 hours a month online, four hours less than in 1995. The pollsters also found that 40 per cent of Web
surfers use 9,600 baud or slower modems, speeds which ensure that the heavy graphics and Java animation found on many sites will take achingly long to download. Worse still for Web enthusiasts, it seems as though the
growth in use is limited to the workplace. We found out from Statistics Canada that only 7.4 per cent of Canadian households are connected to the Internet at home, but Andersen Consulting tells us that 29 per cent of
Canadians have used the Net at least once in the past year. Something is fishy here, but these studies suggest that most of us are using the Internet at work, which makes it a better tool for reaching business than
consumers. As the bloom wears off the Internet rose, Webmasters will have to think more about what surfers want, and less about tossing up a Web page simply for its own sake.
Cornerstone is a writing and editing firm that uses marketing and PR principles to create "words you can build your business on."
Call us from anywhere in the world for rush work.
|
|||