UK firms trail US in way they handle rich web content

UK is lagging behind the US in the way web sites handle rich web content

FTSE 350 companies are less able to exploit e-commerce opportunities than their US Fortune 500 competitors because web coding practices in the UK are less advanced, according to the head of web optimisation firm Aptimize, Ed Robinson.

In an interview with Computing, Robinson explained that US Fortune 500 and FTSE 350 sites have similar web site home page load times when accessed internationally, despite the fact that the US is a generation ahead in terms of content.

“The content is so much richer and yet performs at an equivalent speed because the US Fortune 500 sites are using better web site coding principles,” said Robinson.

As the FTSE 350 firms try to catch up with their US competitors in terms of rich content, they will be hit by performance problems such as slower upload time, which US firms have already dealt with.

“However, there’s a lot of research out there saying that if your web site increases its performance by 20-25 per cent, your sales or ‘conversions’ will increase by 10-15 per cent – that’s a powerful statistic and a bit worrying for the UK,” he added.

Robinson argued that the more experience developers have of using packages that create rich content, the better they are at honing their advanced web coding skills.

“With any web site development package there’s only so much that developers will learn on specialist courses. Most of their tricks are picked up through experience of using the package," he said.

"For example, sites coded using Flash [and SilverLight], a relatively new package, perform at less than a quarter of the speed of web pages coded using JavaScript.

"This is a heads-up to FTSE 350 CIOs: FTSE 350 firms will have to make the sites comparable with those in the US, and so they’re going to have to pull up their socks up in terms of coding principles,” he added.

According to Aptimize’s web site load time data, the five fastest FTSE 350 firms are: The Restaurant Group with a page load of 1.92 seconds; Tesco with an upload speed of 2.05 seconds and WH Smiths with an upload speed of 2.08 seconds. Chilean copper mining group Antofagasta plc came fourth, and specialist manager of emerging markets equities for global institutions Genesis Investment Management LLP was fifth.