| LED Digest 2140: The New Design Rules |
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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 17, 2006 Issue #2140 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Tracking Clicks ==-- ~ James Kalassery "With PHP this is a relatively simple activity." --== Site Loading Times ==-- ~ Roy Williams "If you can reduce the work that the server has to do [you may] save yourself money!" ~ Brad Waller "Users do value having larger images to view..." ~ Dave Starr "Pretty designs have absolutely no value unless they are accessed." ~ Mark Whitman "Page load time *is* important..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== The WayBack Machine ==-- ~ Michael Martinez ~ Bob Gladstein ~ Brad Waller ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: James Kalassery 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 With PHP this is a relatively simple activity. On all our sites, we use the link "mysite..com/outlinks.php?link=mycustomersite..com" where the click on the customers' advertisement / link takes the visitor to the customers' site through the script ../outlinks.php where all required data is captured and stored, (if, as and when necessary), and then automatically takes the visitor to the customer's site. All in a milli- second, perhaps. The visitor will not feel any delay. Once the data is in our database, we can get any kind of information that we are looking for by arranging the data in the required format. Incidentally, we also log all pageviews in this manner, for security reasons. Regards, James Kalassery james.kalassery, businessdigests.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Roy Williams Subject: Loading times This is an interesting thread, but one thing seems to have been forgotten. If you can reduce your page size by trimming down graphics and removing redundant spaces from the HTML, the page WILL load faster. Because there is less work for the server to do, it can do its job quicker. A slow server is a slow server, even with a broadband connection. We all know that. If you can reduce the work that the server has to do, your pages will load faster, and with some hosting accounts, you'll save yourself money! Real gone, Roy Williams Nervous Records www.nervous.co.uk -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Brad Waller Subject: Loading times For some added stats, I checked the numbers for our EPage.com site which is catered to the general public (as opposed to hi tech), and I found only 13% on dialup. AdJungle has more high end users, and it shows 10% on dialup. I'm not saying that this means we should bloat the pages, but this does mean that we can add useful content to the pages at the expense of load times. Users do value having larger images to view when they look at the thumbnails on the listing pages and larger images on the ad pages, so we have enlarged those over the years. We have added other small images and increased page size by a factor of two or three since 1994 when we started. This goes along with the screen size issue. We used to maintain very austere pages that could fit into 600 pixels or so wide displays. That meant images on ad pages had to be 400 pixels wide. Now we allow images to be up to 468 pixels wide. We still keep the JPEG quality low to save bandwidth, but the larger picture makes for a better ad for our customers. Those on dialup can choose to browse with images off, like I used to when I had dialup. As for display size, less than 1% have screens smaller than 800x600! Brad Waller Manage and Sell your own site advertising http://adjungle.com waller, adjungle.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Dave Starr Subject: Loading times > Imagine my surprise that some web designers > consider 30% of potential customers not important... > Designers that create sites with noticeable load > times... are not doing their clients any good. - Tracy Coyle, LED 2139 Couldn't agree more with Tracy's comments. The reasons viable customer may not have broadband are legion. To dismiss 30+ percent of potential customers out of hand is the thinking of a design-geek, not a business person. Pretty designs have absolutely no value unless they are accessed. Think of it this way ... if the site is designed and optimized to load with reasonable speed on dialup, it will load in the blink of an eye on a broadband user's screen. I've never yet caught myself complaining about a site loading too fast. Is there any good evaluation software out there that allows a designer to simulate site interaction at various connections speeds? Would be a useful tool, methinks. Please the person with the credit card in hand, not the technology enthusiast. Dave Starr -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mark Whitman Subject: Loading times > If 30% of visitors are on dialup, that means you could increase > site revenue by almost 43% simply by catering to these users. > Same goes for lower resolutions. Is their money not good enough? - Andreas Huttenrauch, LED 2139 As expected, there was much disagreement and misunderstanding of my suggestion that worrying about blazing fast page loads for dialup users is not necessary. I didn't suggest that anyone load up their site with 500k graphics and huge Flash headers etc so that it's unbearable for dialup users. I also didn't suggest that download times are not important. What I meant specifically was that using *somewhat* larger graphics (and even I'm not a fan of using large Flash files) than those used in the 90's will not reduce conversion rates or sales. I probably could have worded my original post better. I have not created a single commercial site with less than 6% conversion rate (of those I've kept track of) in many years so I feel confident that using a few 25K - 50k files on a page if necessary does not slash sales or other types of conversion. Since so many sites are using larger graphics and more Flash these days dialup users are surely getting used to pages loading a bit slower than in previous years. Do dialup users immediately leave any site that doesn't download instantaneously? I doubt it, otherwise they'd be spending lots of time looking for sites with no more than a few 5k graphics on them. Yes, dialup users will probably leave a site if it has an elaborate 500K flash header or other unreasonably large graphics all over it however that's not what I was suggesting. Page load time *is* important, that's common knowledge, and every professional developer / marketer, including me, pays attention to download times. My experience tells me that what's *not* important in 2006 however, in terms of conversion rate on commercial sites is restricting all graphics file sizes to 1-10k or calculating if the sum total of all files on a page is under 50k as was the rule of thumb about *10 years ago*. Andreas' claim that "catering" to less than a third of site users by degrading the site so that it loads in a couple seconds for dialup users will result in an automatic 43% increase in revenue does not compute. I'm not knocking dialup users or saying that they are not important but the Internet is moving ahead with or without them and I believe it won't be long before dialup is a memory people will joke about. Remember trying to develop sites that also look good in the old AOL browsers? Does anyone check sites with an old AOL browser anymore? Some people might still use it, isn't their money good enough? :) Mark Whitman ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Michael Martinez Subject: WayBack > While Bob Goldman says he has internal pages indexed > by Archive.org, I've never seen a site where this has happened. > That of course doesn't dispute Bob's correction. - Lee Roberts, LED 2139 I use Archive.Org heavily and have often found internal pages (and images) to be indexed. I have never attempted to determine why some sites only have their home pages indexed and why some sites are deep crawled, but I suspect it has something to do with linkage. The Wayback's spiders are probably not as sophisticated as other search services' spiders. Michael Martinez "Cuando Maria canta, canta para mi" http://www.michael-martinez.com/ http://michael-martinez.blogspot.com/ -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Bob Gladstein Subject: WayBack Lee, I'd be happy to show you archived copies of internal pages from the site, along with archived copies of the site's home page dated March 7, 8 and 9 2005, all three of which are identical, along with a copy of the page from March 5 which has one sentence less than the March 7 copy. The March 5 and March 7 entries are both starred; March 8 and 9 are not. March 5 05: http://web.archive.org/web/20050305053958/http://www.annasinkovska.com/ March 7 05: http://web.archive.org/web/20050307090542/http://www.annasinkovska.com/ March 8 05: http://web.archive.org/web/20050308025738/http://www.annasinkovska.com/ March 9 05: http://web.archive.org/web/20050309012237/http://www.annasinkovska.com/ The list of archived copies of that page: http://web.archive.org/web/*sa_/http://www.annasinkovska.com/ And here's a list of archived copies of a page two directories below the root on that domain: http://snipurl.com/paop [web.archive.org] By the way, it's Gladstein, not Goldman. Bob Gladstein -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Brad Waller Subject: WayBack Lee Roberts says that he has never seen a site where internal pages are indexed by Archive.org. You can review the oldest record for our original EP.com classifieds from 1996. The home page is here: http://web.archive.org/web/19961201134759/http://ep.com/ And links to internal pages, such as for our co-branded classifieds: http://web.archive.org/web/19961204001903/ep.com/h/misc/client.html Or our "Agent" program: http://web.archive.org/web/19961204001958/ep.com/h/misc/agent.html Go to 2000 and you can see how out logo and page changed: http://web.archive.org/web/20000510201912/http://www.ep.com/ Click on any link and you should see the site from 2000. In fact, I was able to go two levels deep and I even found an ad I posted (LA Kings Tickets) that could be clicked on: http://snipurl.com/paow [web.archive.org] In general, you can find every page that is one level deep for our site. The archive may vary in what it keeps depending on how popular a site is. I could see them keeping more pages for a really popular site, and only a few (or the home page) for those that only get a few visitors. Brad Waller Manage and Sell your own site advertising http://adjungle.com waller, adjungle.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men." - Herman Melville |
