I am a big Lebron James fan, we all know this. Tonight, while waiting to watch game 2 of the NBA Finals, I decided to surf over to LebronJames.com. Now considering that I do enterprise sized web application development as a profession, I was quite surprised to see how totally poorly designed his site is. From an aesthetic perspective it’s very nice. If you like the edgy look, it’s great. This has nothing to do with the appearance.
On initial navigation, I was presented with a flash loading screen that lasted upwards of a minute or two on a 5Mb/s Cable connection. Even then, once the page had actually rendered something, I was greeted with another content loading screen that lasted nearly an additional minute.
They say the average time for someone to bounce your page is 2.5 seconds if they don’t see anything interesting. In this case, when you are dealing with attention deficit teens and kids, it’s probably even less. A 3 minute load time for navigable content is insane.
Just a tip to your design team LBJ, lighten the graphics a bit, use some CSS layout, don’t be quite so flash dependant. You need something for your visitors to see from the start. I hope it’s fixed, it was painful to browse..
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