Summer Website Olympics—The Speed Competition

August 19, 2004

Designs have improved, techniques have gotten faster, how do our olympic websites fair this year. Our first competition will be web page speed. The contestants are as follows: Lane one—Athens 2004 website (I hope I get permission to link here), lane two—NBC Olympics website, lane three—ESPN Olympic site, lane four&mdashFox Sports Olympic website.

This race is sponsored by WebSiteOptimization.com, Higher traffic and speed guaranteed.™ Is everyone ready? On your marks, get set, go!

Website File Size Report Medal
Athens 2004 126.984 KB GOLD
Fox Sports Olympics 176.026 KB SILVER
ESPN Olympics 354.572 KB BRONZE
NBC Olympics 388.517 KB —

It looks like the official Olympic site, Athens 2004, blew the competition away on this one. Congratulations, nice clean table/css hybrid code. Note: file size may vary from day-to-day, but this race is done for now. Next up is the Accessibility competition, How will our competitors fare on this one, stay tuned.

Comments

Darren said:

great idea! We'd noticed the official site was pretty quick this year too.

Are you going to do a medal table update speed test? If you do come check us out - we reckon we give the big boys and girls a run for their money.

Posted on Aug. 19, 2004 09:29 #

Blake Scarbrough said:

Darren, your site would certainly beat out the 'big boys', nice work.

Posted on Aug. 19, 2004 22:14 #

Stuart Young said:

1) It would good if you could provide some methodology for your test - did you only test the homepage of each site, or did you test more than one representative page.

2) Your 4 competitors are a bit US-centric aren't they - the web is international nowadays. You could have at least tested:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics_2004/default.stm

Given that there are 8 lanes on a track you could have chosen 8 competitors.

cheers

Posted on Sep. 8, 2004 17:56 #