Web Design Directory

  w   w   w   .   d   e   s   i   g   n   d   i   r   .   n   e   t
An industry leading web design, hosting and development directory. We bring together the best web designers and their customers. Find the lates website business news and updates.
Search DesingnDIR
Advertising | Submit Site »
   » Home Page / Industry News  
  Find Services Provider       Technology Stories        WebSite Services   
Credit-Card Web Sites Leave The Dial-Up Crowd In The Dust, Report Finds

2005-05-17 11:07:00

The study is based on Keynote monitoring the technical performance of nine companies' Web sites over a month. Some experienced more than 19 hours of downtime during peak periods, while others performed poorly over dial-up connections, indicating that the sites were designed with high-speed Internet users in mind.

The study evaluated credit-card sites of American Express, Bank of America, Bank One, Capital One, Chase, Citibank, Discover, MBNA, and Providian. While Bank of America, Capital One, and MBNA were the best overall performers in site responsiveness and site reliability, none of the sites ranked well in all 10 performance categories, which are: average T1 response, response-time consistency, geographic uniformity, load handling, average DSL response, average dial response, technical page design, network connectivity, reliability, and outage hours.

"What surprised us most about the study is the lack of focus on dial-up users by the credit-card companies in comparison to other financial-services companies that we benchmarked to," says Ben Rushlo, manager of professional services at Keynote. About 43% of U.S. households still use dial-up, according to Keynote. The study found that dial-up users had to wait on an average of 35 seconds to download each page of a transaction on these credit-card sites, which results in a very frustrating customer experience, Rushlo says. Customers use credit-card Web sites for interactions such as checking balances and recent charges, or for changing addresses.

Better technical page design is key to improving site responsiveness, Rushlo says. IT managers can tune specific elements of the site to improve its performance, which, in return, will improve the customer experience.

Downtime also affected many of the sites studied, even during peak periods. Bank of America and MBNA were down less than three hours during the course of a month, while the worst sites reported more than 19 hours of downtime, according to Keynote. "If you're unreliable, you're going end up pushing people into other channels," Rushlo says. A site that's down on a regular basis ends up pushing a higher percentage of customers to call centers, which is a much more expensive way of servicing customers than the self-service sites, Rushlo says.

As result, only Bank of America and MBNA have shown to be close to 99% reliable. The average for all of the sites was about 97.5%. That's a lower average than expected for this industry, Rushlo says, and the worst sites had availability of just under 94%. That gap surprised Rushlo: "The Internet is not new, and you would think that there would be more maturity now, especially for some of these sites that are so dependent on the online channel."

Turner Broadcasting Signs IM Deal With AOL
Turner Broadcasting System Inc. and America Online Inc. on Wednesday unveiled a three-year agreement to add AOL's instant messaging technology to TBS's upcoming games-on-demand broadband service.
'Star Wars' Fans Hit The Web
'Star Wars' fans have launched their own attack on the web, boosting traffic an average of 168 percent at three major Web sites focused on the soon-to-be released sixth movie in the popular sci-fi movie saga, a research firm said Wednesday.
Interest In IPv6 Found To Be Lagging
Juniper report finds that less than 7% of respondents consider it "very important to achieving their IT goals."
States Line Up For Voluntary Internet Sales Tax Program
The effort to unify the collection of sales taxes for Internet purchases is moving toward an important milestone at the end of June, when the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) is scheduled to certify the first states as full members of a voluntary program to collect the Web taxes.
Hacker Shuts Down Japanese Site For Over A Week
A hacker attack that hit a Japanese price comparison site forced it to temporarily shut down operations, Kakaku.com said this week. The closure will cost it approximately 40 million yen ($372,000) in lost revenues, the company said in a news conference Wednesday.
Chase To Issue RFID-Embedded Credit Cards
Chase Bank U.S.A., a division of the nation's largest credit-card issuer, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., will begin offering credit cards that use radio-frequency identification technology. The technology, called "blink," will let consumers make purchases by passing RFID chip-embedded cards in front a point-of-sale terminal. Chase plans to issue millions of blink cards by the end of this year.
Vigilantes Mutilate Phishing Sites
Online vigilantes are taking matters into their own hands, and defacing some phishing sites to warn off the naive, a U.K. Web monitoring firm said Thursday.
Wal-Mart To Turn Over Online Movie Rentals To Netflix
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Thursday said it would turn over its online movie rental business to Netflix Inc., opening up a big market to the smaller company that's battling fierce competition from its larger rival Blockbuster Inc.
EBay Auctions Debut On Time Warner Cable
Time Warner Cable is offering eBay auctions to its television subscribers in Austin, Texas, as part of the cable operator's move toward interactive TV, officials said Thursday.
AOL Launches Netscape 8.0
America Online Inc. on Thursday launched an upgrade of the Netscape browser, which the company says offers the best of Firefox and Internet Explorer, while beefing up defenses against phishers.


   
» Web Hosting Interviews
Web Hosting interviews, news and reviews. Compare the Best web hosting providers.
» Daw - Web Hosting Blog
Views and Comments about Hosting Industry. News, Trends, Products and Sevices.
» Your WebSite Here
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371


» Submit your site to Web Design Directory

About Us | Advertising | Privacy | Terms Of Use | Contact Us

© DesignDIR.net 2003 - 2017, part of of Business Address Network. All Rights Reserved!