[thelist] What makes a good web site?

[Luther, Ron]

Matt Warden asked about tabbed browsing:

>>Do you guys see tabbed browsing affecting any of this? [User willingness to wait 
>>a longer period of time for a site to come up since they can browse info in other 
>>tabs.]


Hi Matt,

Gee, I kinda thought the 'manual tabbed browsing' that I have been doing for years 
was fairly common behavior and had been for quite some time.  I will have anywhere 
from 2 to 5 instances of IE6 open all day and pointed to different sites.  As I 
recall even NN4 allowed me to have multiple instances open and pointed to different 
sites - and even download different files simultaneously, albeit with a serious 
bandwidth hit.

I'm thinking that the increased availability of cheap broadband will (long term) 
make 'site download time' the rather archaic measure of web site 'goodness' 
that IMO it ought to be.   Not that increasing efficiency isn't a good thing, it 
just seems that sometimes there is more focus on clever techniques to gain 
a few tenths of a second here or there without considering whether that time 
is in the best place to improve the 'user experience' or not.  

I guess that while I think good designs are effective, I don't always agree that 
increased efficiency increases the effectiveness of user interaction.


My 2¢,

RonL.