As mentioned in the previous post, newspaper site visitors like short rather than long; light versus heavy; simple in place of complex. This post will address the second attribute.

A major lesson in the early days of Cox Web sites was the need to keep pages light, meaning low on file size. It was a lesson Cox executives picked up from their contacts at Yahoo, whose executives said their research and statistics showed without a doubt that people consumed more pages when they downloaded quickly.

Anyone who remembers the Yahoo site from the early days until the arrival of a Hollywood executive to run the company knows that it held true to the strategy. It was after the arrival of Hollywood that the site went heavy with intensive graphics in a bid to be a content play and begin the inevitable transition toward video. Various reports now claim that Yahoo page views are in decline annually.

Some newspaper sites are tempted out of habit to make their sites as graphically intensive as their newspapers. They argue with some justification that people like graphics and that everyone is on broadband, therefore the old limits are no longer as important. But broadband includes DSL, which can’t keep up with 800k pages.

Yes, access speeds are higher. Yes, they can download pages more quickly, but only if those pages remain light. The lesson: strike a careful balance between speed and quality — just like when you push out a newspaper on deadline.