Load Times Matter

One of my favorite websites is a site called I Can Has Cheezburger, which features humorous pictures of cats with amusing captions, albeit usually misspelled (something called lolspeak). It's a great brief distraction, and usually three or four are posted to the tumble log each day.

Recently, I've been going to ICHC less than I once did. They've added more ads, a couple analytics tools, and a lot of slow-loading extraneous images. At this point, the page can take nearly 45 seconds to load, with my browser constantly bouncing around the window the entire time.

It's an unfortunate lesson in something that every web developer should know: load time matters. Also, not only does load time matter, but be smart about it...I'm willing to sit for a second while an ad loads if I can navigate the page effectively and find what I want; it's very annoying if the page just basically barfs until everything is finished.

Similarly, things like analytics tools backfire if they cause the cessation of the traffic they're supposed to measure.

ICHC: Consider making your site work better. Your content rocks.