A question for website developers: I understand ads loading first, but why is primary content the LAST to load?
Again, I understand that most websites are financed by advertising. I get it.
What I don’t understand is why the core of the website is the very last to load.
For example, let’s say you’re reading a news column. You load the site. First the ads come up. Then the menus and buttons. Then the archives links. Then the help links. Then the links to other sites. etc. etc. etc. Then, at the very end, the column loads.
Why are archive links or links to other websites considered more priority than the actual content? I came to the page to seek the material. The ad loaded, the website made its money. What purpose is there in putting up all that other crap first?
I always wondered this about Microsoft Word. You open Microsoft Word, and you have that delay where it loads fonts and functions and blah blah blah before it gives you the page. Why not load the page first, give me the cursor, and then load the other stuff in the background? It’s not like I can type fast enough such that I’d need to be accessing formatting functions before it was able to load.
So… what’s the logic, because I’m sure there is some?
I guess it’s so that you get to see or use the complete product. If you started using MS Word before it had finished loading it’d be slow to respond and feel sluggish. This would encourage users to try alternatives and MS would lose business.
Websites tend to be designed to load their template first followed by content. This is probably because most pages of a site have the same template. The content is added after the template so that a new page can be created easily. It’s a far fetched educated guess, but it just might be right!
Dave
December 25th, 2009 at 1:26 am
Ummmm, well I could be wrong but I’ve developed web pages and I don’t recall any content or even language that prioritizes what loads first. That would be your browser that prioritizes. So………. yeah ask MS if your using IE, Google for Chrome, Mac for Safari why, but mainly it’s just pages have gotten bigger. Could you imagine loading a web page today on a Comodore 64? wouldn’t have enough memory. Your browser is thrown all the code it needs to load a page most advertisements are nothing more than an embedded flash movie so why does your browser spend most of it’s resources to load a movie? Probably cause it thinks that’s what your main intent is the item that’s 3-4 MB large rather than the 18kb news article your talking about. Imagine if your browser didn’t want to load those first or at least mostly at the same time trying to watch a movie you’d be stuck looking at the title for an hour.
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December 25th, 2009 at 2:14 am
I guess it’s so that you get to see or use the complete product. If you started using MS Word before it had finished loading it’d be slow to respond and feel sluggish. This would encourage users to try alternatives and MS would lose business.
Websites tend to be designed to load their template first followed by content. This is probably because most pages of a site have the same template. The content is added after the template so that a new page can be created easily. It’s a far fetched educated guess, but it just might be right!
Dave
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December 25th, 2009 at 3:04 am
Now this depends on many things:
-> What the coder developing the site thinks
-> Is the site optimized for faster loading?
-> The server hosting the website
-> Your own internet connection
Now If start to write about which coding techniques in XHTML & CSS speed up, and which slow down the website, I’m going to end up with a 15 page answer. The point is, the coder & scripter of the website CAN make the ads load last. By compressing the code and using advanced CSS techniques, using a little PHP code under the hood, he can make it load faster than ever, but it’s up to him - whether it’s his bad day, or he’s coding quick and doesn’t worry too much about details cos he’s getting paid very little or somethin…
Next, comes the server hosting the page. If this is a fast server, and is not under heavy traffic overload, your website will load faster
If it’s a shared hosting, it’s gonna be slow - shared hosting providers host 300-600 websites on one server… get the picture? 
And finally, your own connection, don’t expect fast websites on a 56k
So, in the end it all comes to this: The developer of the website HAS the power to make the website load faster, and load content first, ads later. If you want more details on this topic (how to do it) just ask.
Cheers
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