| LED Digest 2138: Who Cares About Dial-up? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. April 13, 2006 Issue #2138 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Site Loading Times ==-- ~ Carrie Cassidy "...also please count the number of pages a shopper clicks through." ~ Mark Whitman "...the relatively few dialup users will just have to get used to waiting longer..." ~ Steven Rothberg "...the connection speed for users...will vary tremendously site-to-site." ~ Lee Roberts "Dial-up versus broadband access has always been misleading information." --== Ethics of Tracking Clicks ==-- ~ Claudiu Spulber "I think more accurate would be a PHP script..." ~ Lee Roberts "Wouldn't a simple onclick=jsFunction work...?" --== Phishing ==-- ~ John Smart "I think the best solution is education." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== The WayBack Machine ==-- ~ Bob Gladstein ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Carrie Cassidy Subject: Loading times > ... over the last year I have tended to... pay significantly > less attention to [site loading times]... What a shock > this morning when I looked at stats... that showed that > 30.43% of visitors to [my new site] site were dial-up users. - Greg Watson, LED 2137 Thanks for pointing this out, Greg, because so few designers seem to consider it any more. My apartment, from which I do all my online shopping, is on dial-up. Migration to broadband is impractical for me and for others in my situation. As web designers are (re)considering load times, also please count the number of pages a shopper clicks through. I leave a site that routes me through extra pages because I have to wait for all the headers, footers, and side bars to load each time. (I never know what those teaser headlines on AOL are all about because it takes too many clicks to actually get to the selected story.) Regards, Carrie Cassidy http://www.datavantagecorp.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mark Whitman Subject: Loading times I develop all sorts of projects and have taken the same attitude as you, load times aren't nearly as critical as they were a few years ago. There are lots of other developers out there who feel the same way and are developing sites that reflect this attitude. Ok, so you "only" have 70% high speed user access, that's an overwhelming majority. As more and more developers, including those with conversion rate on their mind (like me), use larger (within reason) files etc on their sites the relatively few dialup users will just have to get used to waiting longer for pages to load. I'm guessing it's already a common experience for them. And how much longer will dialup even be an issue? The population of dialup users is shrinking by leaps and bounds every month. Next year maybe 15% of your users will be dialup, maybe 5% the next year. So it gets to be like the screen resolution issue -- how low do you go when setting a "lowest common denominator"? Is there *anyone* developing sites for 640x480 resolution anymore? I highly doubt it. Does anyone develop sites that load fast for users with 14.4 modems? Maybe a couple but IMHO there's no need to worry about dialup users, they're "surfing" slower everywhere these days and they'll be virtually extinct before long. Mark Whitman -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Steven Rothberg Subject: Loading times I think that you'll find that the connection speed for users of various sites will vary tremendously site-to-site. Those sites which are used primarily by lower and moderate income consumers from their homes are more likely to be used at dial-up speeds. Our career site is primarily used by college students and recent graduates, so only 13 percent of our users are connecting at dial-up speeds. If you don't know information such as this about your users and want to know it (all site owners should want to know it because it greatly impacts architectural decisions such as whether to build a graphically rich but therefore slower site), then get your web hosting company to provide you with tracking reports. They should be free. If your hosting company won't provide those to you for free, then get Google Analytics. It is free and awesome. Steven Rothberg CollegeRecruiter.com career site http://www.collegerecruiter.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Lee Roberts Subject: Loading times Dial-up versus Broadband access has always been misleading information. Nielsen//NetRatings posted an article a month or so back that said 95+ million active US Internet subscribers are using broadband. eMarketer wrote a piece about Nielsen's article entitled "Two-Thirds of US Web Users Now On Broadband" (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003875). The assumption and reasoning is absurd. Broadband access is based upon the availability of faster than ISDN access within in a geographical location. Satellite access is considered broadband and because HughesNet and DishNetwork both offer satellite access to the 48 contiguous states, access is considered to be 100% saturation. This does not mean that everyone wants to pay the rates for satellite access. The cost to purchase the equipment required for satellite access is considerably higher than that of DSL and cable. DSL and cable access is greatly limited. With more than 45% of the US population in non-DSL and non-cable access areas, how then can 95+ million Web users be subscribed to faster then ISDN service when it isn't really available to them? Statistics and analytic software that analyzes Web access does not consider the use of ISP proxies nor the time of day the accesses are made. However, reviewing access times will typically reveal that 75 - 80% of a site's traffic is made during the day when people are using their employer's broadband access. Many reports have shown that this pattern is a result of several factors: 1. People's lives are busier than prior to the Internet era. 2. Families with one computer often see the parents accessing the Internet from work versus from home 3. Children have different focuses and their access patterns are reversed from the majority of adults. This leads to reversed access patterns with the high during the evening. But, who am I to know ... like many of the LED readers I live on my computer. Sincerely, Lee Roberts http://www.roserockdesign.com http://www.applepiecart.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Claudiu Spulber Subject: Click tracking > We need to track clicks [but] this means redirecting to another > page then ultimately to the website of the customer. Is it ethical > to add a small 1 pixel gif with the link on their listing page...? - Jason Ohrum, LED 2137 Well redirecting to another page and using an image are not the only solutions. I think more accurate would be a PHP script and there are free ones that you can choose from: http://snipurl.com/p49u [hotscripts.com] As for the image tracking, if it's used on your website and mention it in the Privacy Policy then it's ethical. Regards, Claudiu Spulber http://www.backup4all.com// http://www.novapdf.com// -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Lee Roberts Subject: Click tracking In LED 2137 Jason Ohrum asks, > Is it ethical to add a small 1 pixel gif with the link on their > listing page so the page still confers link popularity? This type of link limits the value available to the member. My concern would be more about why directories need to count the clicks to a site. Is it for a billing purpose? Or is it to just show members that clicks are happening? Wouldn't a simple onclick="jsFunction" work and perform the same functionality? This would remove the problem with automated bots coming through and clicking the links since bots can't process JavaScript. Just an idea. Sincerely, Lee Roberts http://www.roserockdesign.com http://www.applepiecart.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: John Smart Subject: Phishing > ... let's concentrate on a specific > type of spam -- phishing. - John Quinlan, LED 2137 Phishing works the same way that spam works - insofar as there would be no spam if we all ignored it, but once in a while I get a spam that interests me, and I follow the link. This makes me part of the problem, and honestly, I should know better. Every time some one spends money because of a spam, that guarantees more spam. A client of ours is related to a spammer who makes a terrifying amount of money at it - I could not believe the figures, and let's face it - if he lost money he would not do it. I think the best solution is education. I think ALL credit card companies / banks should send papers in English, not in lawyerese explaining that they will never ask for certain details. They should supply a sticker to go on to monitors, maybe a picture of a Visa card or social security card (or national insurance number depending on which side of the pond you sit) with a red line through it. My mother in law, who is a pretty bright lady, has contacted me twice this year asking if mails were genuine. Thank goodness she was aware enough to ask, although it depresses me that she needed to. Still it just goes to show these attacks look very very real. Another solution would be an Interpol for the web e-interpol. But global agreement is unlikely. Maybe the banks could police it. Think about it - Suppose joe conman opens a phishing organization in Nigeria (I have nothing against Nigerians - I am certain that 99.99 percent of them are much better people than I am, but boy, that .01 percent cause some trouble!) and they run it through the national bank of Nigeria. When everything catches up, if the European and American banks said "Hey BoN, this is your problem. Give us our money back, or say good-bye to global financial transactions" - I bet their banks would increase security enough to protect the general public. But if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that John Quinlan is correct. Whatever the solution - assuming that there is one, it will be funded by us - end users and business people trying to get by. John Smart, Technical Director InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Bob Gladstein Subject: WayBack > The Wayback Machine located at Archive.org only shows > changes to the home page. It only shows the major changes. - Lee Roberts, LED 2137 That's actually not correct. Archive.org has internal pages for one of my sites going back to December of 2002, and some of the pages it shows are the same as the previous version. It's only the pages with asterisks next to their listing that show changes from the previous cache. In fact, you can either search on a particular URL to see if there's a copy of it, or you can navigate within their saved copy of their site to find the internal pages they've archived. Bob Gladstein ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. 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