We're running out of time

[Toon]

I remember 2-3 years ago the web design statement.....

"You only get 30 seconds to impress your user"

It was so true but are we running that time down already?

Instead of having to visit 100's of websites a day you all know I'm a fan of feeds. I decided to do an experiment and I timed my average time on a feed over a week and it was 8.3 seconds, that's not a lot to impress someone!!!

As you may have figured a great photo/illustration/logo etc. made me read on or click the link. A well written tagline always helps.

But 8.3 seconds, good or bad? Does it mean with more and more so called web designers that only the best will stand out, meaning if you do your job well it will work for you?

Does it make the photographers/logo designers/graphic designers more important as far as web development goes?

The only reason I bring this up is, there's always the "I hate waiting for flash to load" and the "building with tables slows the load time for some users" arguements but RSS feed sends everything through at the same time, whether it's just text, an image, a video, so content is king and makes me read or ignore? I'd love to hear thoughts everyone has. (even though everytime I mention netvibes everyone goes, "what's that??")

[LeadMagnet]

Well i think for starters you need a few more samples for that figure, and not just people who spend as much time online as you do but people that are your target audience.
People who spend as much time online as we do learn to filter out the **** alot faster than other people. It can be just as good as it was before, but if it's not, we're not gonna stick around and keep reading to be sure it's ****.
It feels like ****, i go somewhere else.

It seems to me that the faster someone's internet connection, the more they get used to having their info display a.s.a.p.
So as long as you have an average speed server and you code your page so the info displays after the average amount of time for that type of site (whatever that may be), then you don't have to worry about anything.
Flash can display plenty of it's content before all the fancy visuals are up, just like html does.