Irbtrax SEO and Market Research recently conducted an independent study of website's belonging to celebrity billionaire business entrepreneurs Sir Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, and Donald Trump. The goal was to learn from the best, while attempting to find ways to improve on their high performance standards.
The Oprah.com website was chosen because it is extremely popular. Therefore, by studying it’s 'Digital Highway DNA', valuable lessons could be learned. At the same time, attempting to find a ways to improve on it's Best Practice standards would be fun and challenging.
The study concluded that Oprah Winfrey's use of Content Rich text and User Interactivity are very progressive. However, it also revealed that based on a website optimization speed test, it can take up to 103 seconds for the Oprah.com® home page to download when using a basic 56K dial up service. A similar test revealed that it can take up to 201 seconds to download 'oprah.com/topics/health' under the same circumstances.
It is believed this result can be contributed to the Oprah.com website's inclusion of advanced flash graphics because they consume a lot of bandwidth. The study showed that most of these advanced flash graphics appear to be contained in the advertisements on her site. Which was surprising, considering these forms of advertisements can make the website difficult to download for a significant portion of her target market.
In conclusion the analysis showed that Oprah Winfrey excels at Branding and her use of innovative ideas are industry leading. However, the demographics of the above outlined users include a wide range of incomes, ages, and geographical locations. And according to recent studies, the number of people who now fall into this category has increased due to the recession. Therefore, making the site more difficult to download for this particular group of visitors could lessen it's potential reach.
For more information contact Andrew Moir:
www.irbtrax.com
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