fast web pages, happy customers

Some pages on retail shopping sites take almost 10 seconds to open, according to a new Nielsen Online study of major shopping sites. Woah, that’s way too slow … g0odbye customers!

Don’t be like Noel Leeming, which in the study came  in slowest at a time of 9.57 seconds. Make sure your site’s pages open fast before you scare off visitors.

One way to do this is to have keep data-heavy information on the page to a minimum. That means, for example, ensure all your photos are optimised to good web sizes and stay away from too much animated Flash content.

Also consider, if many of your clients are overseas, basing your website on a web server in the country where most of your clients are, or have specific sites for each country. It’s cheap and easy to have your site hosted with an overseas web host, And the closer the site is to its customers, the faster the site’s pages will open for those customers – keeping them happier and more active on the site.

Nielsen Online general manager Ivan Fuyala was reported saying that the accessibility and viability of a website is a key business success metric.

“If consumers can’t reach you quickly online, it won’t take long before they start looking to competitors instead.”

rank high in Google or go unnoticed

New research from Google shows that readers of its search results place a lot of importance on the first two listings and not too much below that.

Sort of  makes a mockery of the truism that you need to be somewhere on the first two pages of results to get noticed. Buddy, you need to be at the top of the first page!

Here’s Google’s eye-scan data:

open a file, no software needed

If you’ve got a Firefox web browser, we’ve found a great plug-in that lets you open and view a file (such as a document or an image) without having the software needed for that file. That’s pretty cool. Open a Word .doc for example without having Microsoft Word on the machine. The plug-in’s called Open It Online.