Minimum Requirements for a Website on Internet Needed?
Too_Many_Tools
Posts: 765
Recently I took a laptop out of a year old storage and attempted to get on the Internet.
Let's just say that lots has changed in just a year..it took many hours of updating to get it up to speed for the websites out there today.
And of course with the heavier CPU/bandwidth usage that websites demand today, the laptop was slower...while the infomation content was at the best the same.
It seems to me that a Internet minimum requirement needs to be invoked and enforced for web site development.
Having a search engine like Google screen for minimum requirements like bandwidth and CPU loading would quickly get the offenders in line.
Using state of the art computers and screaming fast fiber connections I still find many sites to be unusable because of the massive advertising content that they attempt to pile on.
FWIW...one of the joys of the Parallax site is limited advertising hype...thanks guys and gals.
Your thoughts?
Let's just say that lots has changed in just a year..it took many hours of updating to get it up to speed for the websites out there today.
And of course with the heavier CPU/bandwidth usage that websites demand today, the laptop was slower...while the infomation content was at the best the same.
It seems to me that a Internet minimum requirement needs to be invoked and enforced for web site development.
Having a search engine like Google screen for minimum requirements like bandwidth and CPU loading would quickly get the offenders in line.
Using state of the art computers and screaming fast fiber connections I still find many sites to be unusable because of the massive advertising content that they attempt to pile on.
FWIW...one of the joys of the Parallax site is limited advertising hype...thanks guys and gals.
Your thoughts?
Comments
Everybody publishes in a way they can find to work. Some get along with few ADS and little dynamic content, others use considerable amounts of both.
There are some sites I subscribe to and it's interesting. With the ADS, the computer load can be pretty high. Without them, it can be pretty high, though not as high.
Think of this problem like media advertizing in general. Nobody really cares much about the over 50 crowd for example. They buy stuff, and often a lot of stuff, but the longer term branding efforts are largely done with them, where they aren't done with 20 somethings.
People with modest computers are similar. If you have newer gear, you probably buy stuff. If not, it's increasingly likely you don't. Site developers will cater accordingly.
From there, it's center of gravity. No dictates will be meaningful, but trends will. Site developers will use analytical tools to determine what traffic impact design decisions have, and that's the end of it.
Your point of view is they are offenders. From their point of view, you are in the late majority to laggard category of Internet users, and really aren't the focus.
How did you measure CPU/bandwidth usage and information content? Do you have benchmarks?
Huh?
What? Why Google and what minimums do you suggest?
Examples?
Like many previous posts, criticisms but no evidence - just opinion.
Thanks for the advice..I am aware of those options.
The fact that Adblock is extremely popular tells us that my opinion is shared by many.
LOL...wake up on the wrong side of the bed?
I suspect you are correct...a friend has noted that the Internet is overrun by those who will do anything for an advertising dollar.
As I mentioned earlier, the hardware and broadband connection that I have available is state of the art..and the example I am describing is a laptop that is a current model..we get prototypes before they are released to the public for beta testing...so what I am addressing is not limited by technology.
My comments are directed towards the sorry state of web design/implementation that we see today on the Web...it is just a form of on-line spamming.
In the past I have used Yahoo extensively...now with their new focus on advertising using the site is a pain at the best.
If it's not going to be AD driven, then we either have a lot less, or it's going to cost a lot more and or need a payment system that has the granularity ADS currently do.
We already have a fair number of subscription options, and most people can only do a few of those before they really start to add up.
Once it moved out of academic circles, it was always going to be AD driven. There isn't any other effective means of making enough of an economy out of things to make sense!
Notice the old-Internet uses? Basic forums, e-mail, and other things used for collaboration / communication run lean, largely AD free, etc...? Those don't cost much, and or there are some genuine synergies that make doing those things worth it. Everything else is going to be a function of delivering attention to those who require it.
Secondly, the data about that attention delivery is where all the money is!
In a real sense, you are the product in most AD driven models. The trade is they get to know something about you and your interests and in return you get something like data, or news, etc...
Some aspects of design are quite good! Loading it up with ADS is a natural escalation.
There is good news, assuming the US continues to keep sane Internet neutrality policy, and that is you have a lot of options on the client side of things. When traditional media went through this, the move was to offer people subscriptions, or just bundle information with ADS, and one look at commercial radio today shows how that ends up. A complete mess that just barely manages to balance the value out.
With the Internet being a peer system, there are some checks and balances going on that help with this as there are tools one can use to limit the damage or improve how older hardware runs.
Here's maybe something a lot of people don't know. Companies pay BIG DOLLARS for the attention and the data. Companies subscribe to services that report EVERYTHING to them. You looked at a product, or opened an e-mail, or filled out a form?
That stuff gets mailed to sales people and data crunching people to improve their chance of matching up their goods and services with people who have a reason to purchase them.
If you do it old school, a single lead can be tens of thousands of dollars to generate! That's just one lead! Now, if you do it somewhat newer school, advertizing on mass media, such as the Super Bowl, millions of prospects see it, and major league branding can be done, as well as leads generated. So they pay a million or few for half a minute, but they get the leads at a fraction cost, or they get branding that lowers the cost of generating them overall.
The value of doing those things is fairly easy to quantify these days and where there is a simple return, people spend big to get it, and the simpler the return, the bigger they will spend! Why? The more you buy, the more you get!
And this drives the ever escalating set of AD choices and tracking systems.
Doing it new school, with all the data tools, better leads can be generated at a fraction cost per lead, and the leads often come with context and contact info sufficient for a follow up, where sometimes doing it old school, with direct response mail, or telemarketing, etc... can get that same info, but at a higher cost and or greater latency. Takes time to get the word out to everybody and it takes a lot of stuff and bodies to do it.
On the other hand, if people are out looking for stuff, why bother with that process? Simply capture what they are seeking and make it easy, always easier actually, for them to get what they want and increasing numbers of them will, cutting out a whole pile of expensive and slow efforts required otherwise.
So there you go. The dollars behind these things are huge, and they aren't ever going anywhere. The value in the data is too high, and all the stuff we are all doing on that net needs to be funded, or it's gone, or it's going to be limited like some big company cable TV type service... ADS and big data are what empowers people to do all the stuff they do.
Finally, the whole model works even when a percentage of us ignore it, or fight against it. The scripts out there, software tools, host files, etc... all can significantly improve how you use Internet and just use them! A few of us do, most of us don't, and here's the secret!
As long as that is true, those things will be tolerated. The moment it gets visible, and AD revenue starts to be seriously impacted, or there are limits on what can be delivered, it won't be tolerated and we end up with something much harder to deal with.
Better to leave some slack in the system. That's what we have right now. Those of us who know our stuff can take a trash computer out of a dumpster, get it online and do amazing things. Most of us can't / won't take the time to do it and that fact is what makes it all go at the low costs we see happening today.
Tough world, but that's the one we live in online.
Factor all that into something like YAHOO!
Invert your thinking. YAHOO! is in the business of selling your attention. They are not in the business of serving you better, and that is because you are not paying them. The people who are paying them want some of your attention and that is what YAHOO! cares about. They will offer you groups, e-mail, and lots of other services so that they can couple your attention with other data and sell that as a package that others find worth buying.
As I wrote above. If you aren't on a machine that is relevant enough to compete these days, it's also very highly likely your attention isn't of much value either.
The design efforts? They are about doing that, while not losing anybody they don't want to lose. Make no mistake though. YAHOO! is perfectly fine maximizing the people attention they can sell and they don't worry so much about those they can't sell so easily.
I believe I understand your perceptive. Correct me if I'm wrong. You take issue with the amount of advertisements and flashy things found on the "Free" internet news sites or the Internet in general? If so, I have a solution, pay for a subscription to the a entity like the Wall Street Journal.
I have worked for internet retailers selling items from Window Blinds to Robotics. I mostly work in business applications where data is stored, sorted, and ultimately sold. In both worlds, businesses are greatly concerned with UI responsiveness and they go to great lengths to ensure a robust and seamless user interface. Don't take my word for it, browse web developer job postings.
News sites work much the same way although revenue is generated from advertisements. The content is published for free but the reader must deal with annoying advertisements.
I am aware of what you mention and agree.
FWIW...I currently typing this on a 15 year old computer...the old taking a piece of trash and making work....on dialup yet....out in the middle of nowhere...in the woods and with the proper software implementation cruise the Internet quite well.
My point is that most websites really, really suck with their implementation...placing an enormous burder on the user to buy more expensive hardware/software/bandwidth just to "tread water to stay afloat" with the needless overhead the websites place on them.
The situation of Net neutrality and having companies (Netflix) to pay extra for adequate bandwidth are symptoms of this finally coming to a head.
The situation of data theft of your personal information from sites like Target and Ebay is another case of how terrible web programming is.
As a friend asked..."If my personal data is so valuable that companies are spending billions to get it, why am I not being compensated for it when it is stolen?"
LOL...from your initial response I knew your occupation.
FWIW...I do pay for some sites...when they have worthwhile content.
And that is the rub...why pay for something if it is available for free elsewhere?
The Internet has caused increased competition in all areas....including news outlets.
Note how easily the revenue model for newspapers was toppled by just one website..Craigslist...and note how bare minimum their website is.
As I said before, most web site implementations overall really suck....we really need a minimum standard in place that is enforced...and I expect that it is coming as the reality of finite bandwidth versus real cost is realized. When a website is charged for the number of bytes it transmits each time an user interacts with it (bytes transmitted = bandwidth expense = supplier cost of doing business), implementations will change.
Yes, and that point is getting a solid rebuttal. Again, the overhead is often necessary for economic reasons. Some of it is ADS, some of it is syndication, some of it is data driven content presentation, etc...
Static, dialup sites, or even very lean data driven sites simply do not compete in the vast majority of scenarios. I've ran and sometimes do run older hardware too, but I don't expect to be productive with it online.
We really don't need a minimum standard. In fact, I would very strongly oppose such a move.
As for limited bandwidth, that's both a political and basic economic issue. In the US, right now, we've got our major ISPs attempting to create artificial scarcity in order to maximize margins and control content in various ways.
Truth is, we've got the systems to scale this up, and in many parts of the world, that is happening with few to no real issues.
Typically, we see network expansions as people innovate on content offerings. Early on, the major drivers of both hardware and network connectivity were games and porn. No joke. Now, those still carry an impact, but now we've got collaboration and communication in general driving a lot of things and the higher level functionality we get from more information rich transfers is worth a lot.
Read this: There are no freebies. Anywhere. Just exchanging this information costs us a coupla bucks total. Parallax makes a contribution, you made one, and you have to fund at least being here to discuss it at a minimum, I made one, as did many others.
During the late 80's and early 90's, this was all discussed. Micro-payments were the other model. They have a number of issues that ADS do not have, and the AD model won because it's far easier to convert attention to cash than it is to get cash in return for some moderate attention.
About the only site of note still using design and technology from that time period is Craigslist, and some backwater haunts I'm sure a few of us still frequent, depending on our interests. Craigslist isn't any kind of real example of how to do it right. What it does represent is how some niches can do just fine on basic technology.
BTW: The newspaper model wasn't done in by Craigslist. Running a local classified AD still packs quite a punch as most papers syndicate their classifieds and for many classic uses of classified ads, the paper still enjoys a dominant influence and it brings paying customers more than it does traffic. The newspaper was done in by media consolidation diluting all the value out of the medium. A similar thing happened to radio. Both technologies can deliver considerable value and compete well. You will see this happening in the few remaining independent papers and radio stations. What they did was adopt Internet media and incorporate it into their business model, all of which again was discussed in the 90's. The few who did those things are just fine today, doing very well.
The majority big media owned didn't, and they are near constantly attempting to get law that props up their antiquated business models instead of making the investments needed to remain high value and relevant.
Craigslist level of technology doesn't generally compete today. Forcing a minimum compliance with dialup and or older hardware would place a severe limit on what people can do, and not all of what they do will be great, but a lot of it will, and if we want the great, we need to make sure it's able to happen. This is one reason why a whole lot of us are strong on net neutrality.
Besides, your older hardware can still get to information. You've just got to make some choices. Text browsing still works on most things. It won't be presented all that well, due to the lack of higher level functionality, but the information is there. Feel free to produce a rendering engine that better suits your hardware. Some people do.
Heck, I jumped on the net just 6 months ago with an IRIX box I brought up for somebody. One can still get a recent build of Mozilla for that OS, and the machine was MIPS at 300Mhz or so, which is probably equal to a P3 800Mhz or thereabouts. No worries. It all still rendered just fine. Took a while though.
So the reality here is you pay now or pay later, but you will always pay. If you want to avoid the cost of newer machines, you will be paying with your time. If you want to optimize for time, you pay for newer hardware. Some people balance it out some, optimizing for both, running moderate hardware with lots of resources and a reasonable net connection.
These are all choices most of us can make.
Rather than set a minimum standard of site compliance for antiquated hardware and connection speeds, we would be much better off following through on broadband for everybody like we did with telephones. Most things are possible that way, even on older stuff! And people can make their choices from there.
As we go forward, the data driven approaches to information are going to continue to make effective use of modern computing technology as they should. Once we advance semantics some, perhaps centralizing some important resources, we will get another layer still, and that layer promises to be agent like, able to act on plan language requests, deliver responses and perform other basic tasks for us we will find useful.
The primary value will be trading an AD, or a small subscription depending on the model, for savings in time. Robust information access and exchange is nearly always about saving time and it's nearly always in the form of educating people as to their options, or empowering them to apply better smarts to their labor so that it's output is sufficient to free up time and dollars.
Remember, the vast majority of the time, you are the product, not the customer. This means what you bring to the table matters. If you don't bring much, you quite simply are not worth all that much and your experiences online will follow accordingly.
I didn't realize Craig's list toppled newspapers. Where did ya read this? On the Internet?
Data driven decisions rule these days. Increasingly, the method will be to collect the data, perform some analysis, act on it, A / B test, evaluate, improve.
Here is what that means:
People who run sites on the Internet will produce a lightweight version and a more robust or "heavy" version. Then they look at the data. In the vast majority of cases, the data will not favor the minimums you call for, and in fact, will show very clearly that adhering to them will reduce overall traffic, user counts, activity, whatever.
Where you say something is of low or little value doesn't mean squat. The truth is in the data analysis.
I just attended a user meetup for a high profile Silicon Valley startup over the weekend. They got new funding and threw their core / alpha users a big bash! Great food, drinks and a lot of awesome conversation. During a Q&A session, some site decisions were brought up. Several of us didn't see the value, so what did they do?
They showed us how the data drives the overall site decisions, talked about their process for testing, etc... Turns out some very basic assumptions were quite easily challenged! A lot of that surprised the room. Here's just one sample: Requiring a user to sign up to view material presented. The basic reasoning goes something like, that turns away tons of people. Well, that's correct! But what isn't so obvious is what people do otherwise. It turns out that people who do sign up are much fewer in number, but their level of site participation is much higher! Those numbers blow away the "random churn" that would normally be assumed to be a good thing.
The take away here is what you would consider optimal isn't likely to actually be optimal, which is what most of the responses on this thread have been getting at. Interestingly, what very experienced people consider optimal isn't likely to be optimal either! Which is why the data driven design has the impact it does today. What any of us thinks is important or proper or efficient doesn't compare with what people actually demonstrate as efficient, important, etc...
There is, in fact, a lot of poor design and bloat out there. The answer is in data, not basic requirements and assumptions.