I am trying to load a finance story from the Independent.
It's been trying to open in the browser for about twenty minutes now.
Twenty minutes is a long time. Famously, Jakob Nielsen reckons most web users click away in eight seconds. It would take me two minutes to go to the newsagent, one minute to buy the paper, another two to walk back - I'd have the story in less than half the time it takes on the web!
Ah, it's just opened :-)
I've done a number of stories about online strategies for InCirculation, focused on issues such as the symbiotic (or competitive?) relationship between newspapers and search engines; syndication; magazine subscriptions online; and digital editions. But I've never talked about getting your bandwidth right, getting decent server software, achieving reasonable page download speeds. Because I didn't think I had to.
Maybe I do.
In fact the Independent was one of the early greats among internet newspapers. It's still got editorial content that makes me want to visit it first or second every morning. But if it's not going to get the basics right, all that effort goes for nothing. And even though I know I want the content, I note a marked disinclination in my mouse finger to click on the bookmark...
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