It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Fresh on the heels of the BrowserHawk 11 release, I suddenly found something on my schedule this weekend I hardy recognized - "Free time".

What a great opportunity to spend some time with the family. I popped the question to the kids, and before you could bat an eye they were buckled up and waiting in the car.

We were headed to a farm about an hour away that has a great pumpkin patch and festival this time of the year. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I had to hop on the farm's web site and get the address.

"I'll be right there." I called out as I fired up Firefox. But to my surprise, the site was taking forever to load. The cries from the garage grew louder, "Can we GO ALREADY??". "Just a minute." I replied.

Only thing was, that minute turned into about ten. I could hardly believe it, but the site was loading about as slow as possible without going in reverse. I was seriously sitting there wondering whether their web "server" was located in the back of a dusty barn with a few chickens and pigs circling nearby.

This experience reminded me all to well that today's web site visitors have no tolerance for web sites that fail to work properly. This applies to all sites. Yes, the year is 2007, and even the local deli or flower shop's site is no longer exempt.

Poor performing web sites costs businesses billions of dollars every year. Yet most businesses remain unaware of performance issues with their site. Yes there are page load time monitoring utilities, and such utilities are great for making sure the site is up and kicking.

But what really matters most in terms of performance is how long the pages take to load for your actual site visitors, not "bots" that are measuring synthetic transactions. Our patent-pending Page Load Time (PLT) technology delivers this capability, and has been a huge hit with small and large businesses alike. We have some interesting studies on this data that we will be sharing with the market as well.

All in all it was a fantastic day with the family. The weather was beautiful, and everyone had a great time. Although, I must admit, I found myself a bit preoccupied at times, looking around corners in the stable and opening a few sliding doors in the barn. I know that server is around there somewhere...