It is as broad as it has breadth
It is as broad as it has breadth
In this column, I’ve often mentioned the fact that it is foolhardy to design a web site that can be conveniently viewed only by those with a broadband connection. Of course, this is especially so if you are using your site to sell a product or a service. Nobody is going to wait two or three minutes for your site to appear on his screen. I found some data on the internet about the number of broadband connections in the world, as estimated by various authorities and I reproduce the figures here (Table I), along with some interesting percentages.
It is, of course, well-known that South Korea is the country with the highest percentage of broadband connections in the world and a high penetration of internet access to the population. Sweden has the highest penetration, but less than one-sixth of the Swedes who have internet access profit from broadband. Even in the USA, five out of six “Internauts” still have no broadband connection. Worse still, in the UK, only one in ten have a fast connection, with one in eight in the top-20 internet-connected countries. As for the rest of the world, only 2.8 per cent of internet users have broadband. Interestingly, six out of the top ten countries are Asian and, out of these, China needs special attention; although it has the third-highest percentage of broadband connections, it has proportionally fewer subscribers able to connect than any other country, bar Brazil. So, nearly 90 per cent of the internet users in the world still cannot surf with a high-speed connection. I was unable to find data splitting these up to users with ISDN, 56 kbit/s (nominal), 28 kbit/s and slower. What I do know is that I recently had to send a drawing to an e-mail correspondent, as an attachment, and he warned me beforehand that I should reduce the file size to an absolute minimum because he was restricted to a snail-paced 9.6 kbit/s.
At the time of writing, these figures are 10 months old, so may have changed a little as more ADSL and cable networks are implemented, but that does not change the general situation.
We see astounding statistics of the number of mobile phone subscriptions in the world, I think over 2 milliard[2] at this time, about three times as many internet connections. This explosion of telecommunications power, even in many very poor countries, would seem to be the antithesis of the slow penetration of broadband internet but, possibly, it may even be the cause. Cellular infrastructure does not come cheap, but it is less costly to construct a cell in a remote village than to connect many kilometres of copper for a hundred lines,far less an optical fibre. The choice many telecomms service providers have is to install cellular telephone antennae or to implement high-speed internet over existing lines – the answer is obvious when you look at the bottom line.
Coming back to my first statement, if you wish your web site to be viewed easily, even in developed countries – and that includes where I am –then make sure the aggregate size of your Home Page is as small as you can possibly make it. Eye-catching multimedia should be a strict no-no. Graphics should be minimalised. If you must use a Flash introduction, make sure the surfer can short-circuit it; better still abstain from it (I frequently just stop downloading such arrogant inconsideration and go on to a different,competitive, site, potentially meaning lost sales for the web owner). Test your site with a 56 kbit/s modem; if it takes more than about 15 s to download the Home Page, then you need to do something. Don’t be like someone I read about, who stated, “If they can’t afford broadband, they can’t afford my products!”.
Table I Statistical breakdown of internet and broadband connections per country, sorted by percentage of connections with broadband (March 2005)
Now for a brief diversion away from the internet. I try to write these columns informally but using reasonable English grammar. No one is perfect,though! Sometimes I may deliberately use what purists consider to be bad grammar for effect, such as the first sentence of this paragraph. I don’t consider it a great sin to wilfully split an infinitive, like I’ve just done,although I try to avoid it where possible. I have a “thing” about where I place “only”: I only go to town twice a week is not the same as I go to town only twice a week. And I’ve been known to start a sentence with a conjunction. Sometimes the proofreaders even modify my grammar, often for the worse. What is this leading up to? I have a shelf full of books about grammar, punctuation, style and language, and I consult them frequently. A recent addition, though, has caused me some pain. It’s almost an amusing book (http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047 1223832.html) purportedly reporting the 47 most common mistakes that journalists make. It is nit-picking in the extreme, to the extent that I had occasional difficulty in identifying the faults in a few of the quotations(although the author agrees with me about “only”!). However, I identified some grammar errors in the text of the book (discussed and confirmed with my daughter, who is an English teacher) … No one is perfect, though!
This publication is a journal. What is a journal? Literally, it is a daily account of what has been happening, a diary, from the French un jour, a day. Known as diurnal, it was used by the church, many centuries ago, but with its current spelling, it dates back to the mid-sixteenth century, as a daily record of the proceedings of Parliament. By the early eighteenth century,the term was used for a daily newspaper and, from there, it was applied to less frequent periodicals, and thus Circuit World. This is not an infrequent usage for technical publications, the British Medical Journal being a long-standing example. In our sphere, there are very few works that merit the title of journal, but there are many magazines. Derived from the French magasin,a store, it is an illustrated periodical with articles, as opposed to peer-reviewed technical papers. However, there is another distinction:magazines, especially the “freebies” rely heavily on advertising for their revenue, whereas journals are subscription-only. Of course, there may be a grey area where a magazine may encroach on the journal’s domain or vice versa. I propose we have a look at the web sites of some of the magazines available.
Printed Circuit Design & Manufacture is a well-known hard-copy magazine. Their online version is also good, but I stand by what I said earlier;the Home Page is horrific with well over 200 kbyte, taking about a minute to download on a DUN connection. Over half of this is due to a single graphics advertisement! I seriously suggest that the publishers may wish to impose a limit of, say, 15 kbyte to each advertiser or sponsor, so that one advertiser,hogging seven times this value, doesn’t scare away readers from seeing all the other advertisers. As I said, the contents are good, and all the more so in that they combine two sectors, in an effort at concurrent engineering, into one publication. The content of the entire printed version is available for downloading, including all the technical and commercial material. What is especially useful is the online Buyers’ Guide; this has about 250 headings with, perhaps, an average of six or seven hyperlinks per subject. You cannot find a supplier more easily than this!
Ugh! This Home Page is a perfect example of how not to publish a Home Page!It is full of Macromedia Flash – and other heavy graphics, often animated– publicity, it is too wide for many browser settings, requiring scrolling and it’s a kilometre long, needing more scrolling. It’s a two-minute-plus download for me, and I’d guess it would be far from instantaneous, even if you do have broadband! The actual technical and commercial articles are well-reproduced, although some of the tables are a tad difficult to read, without expanding the screen, making scrolling even more necessary. Their Buyers’ Guide works differently from the previous one, in that there is a drop-down menu of about 40 subjects, each listing the suppliers. Unfortunately, although the suppliers’ web sites are clearly listed in text, they are not hyperlinked, meaning a Select/Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V kind of operation. What is really positive about CircuiTree is the catalogue of regular contributors, industry icons like Joe Fjelstad, Happy Holden, Walt Custer, Karl Dietz and others. With columnists such as these, a free subscription to the printed version must be worthwhile; maybe the electronic version is just that little too painful for regular reading.
The magazine here is slightly marginal to the subject of this journal, as it purports to be on surface mount technology – or is it? You see, if we follow the agenda of concurrent engineering, we should also follow the related technologies, so, yes, I do believe it is relevant here. Anyway, this is another heavily loaded Home Page (about 300 kbyte or getting on for a two-minute DUN download), thanks to a multiplicity of ads and logos. I get the impression that the articles I looked at, and the regular columns, were slightly more “lightweight”than those of the two previous magazines, but this does not mean there is no useful information. On the contrary, there is some good reading. There does not appear to be a Buyers’ Guide.
Believe it or not, as Ripley would have said, 977 kbyte or over five minutes to download the page with a 56 kbit/s modem! Even those with a 1 Mbit/s maximum ADSL connection would suffer something like 10-20 s to see this horrendously heavy page. The “blurb” states PCB007 is the leading real-time online magazine for the printed circuit board (PCB), Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) and PCB Design Industries. With over 11,000 articles published, PCB007 is the Electronic Packaging Industry news leader. What is interesting is that it is only on the internet for all and sundry to see, without a hard copy version. Like the previous site, this one is stronger on news than on technical information, although it is supported by such names as Earl Moon,Harvey Miller, etc. to lend a few more kilograms on the technical side. There are links to some associated sites for purchasing information and so on.
The EverythingPCB site does not claim to be a magazine, but it really is an online one. It has everything that makes for one: EverythingPCB is a printed circuit industry product, service and resource guide listing everything from software to manufacturers to assembly services and everything in-between, even down to a few cartoons. Although the layout of this page is much less cluttered-looking than any of the previous ones, the level of advertising and the graphics files is pretty much on a par (maybe the wrong adjective, as much of it is not pretty, at all!).
This magazine may be considered as another marginal one, to some extent sitting between the Circuit World and Microelectronics Internationalstools. The Home Page advertising is at a better level, spoilt only by two“monsters” of 43 and 80 kbyte, respectively, bringing my download time to about only 50 s! I looked through some of the archived technical articles, many of which were of a good standard, but – oh, joy! –they were free of advertisements, making them fast to download. I can confirm,also, that some of them are relevant to the subject matter of this journal.
It can be done! Printed Circuit Europe has a well-designed graphics Home Page with advertisements, seven of them, to be precise, some of them animated, but the aggregate of the graphics came to a relatively modest 44 kbyte, proving that the gargantuan pages of all the previous sites are unnecessary. Is it coincidence that this is the first one that is not made in the USA? However, my satisfaction ends there; I could not find a single word of editorial or technical content, not one. Effectively, the site is just one advertisement to try and attract advertisers for the printed magazine. I wonder whether it succeeds?
Slightly poorer than the previous site for downloading, Cooling Zone handles a subject often glossed over by engineers, designers and PCB fabricators. With shrinking electronics and sub-micrometer chip connections, heat dissipation is often problematic. How many fabricators can offer any advice to their clients on the thermal design, especially of conductive inner layers? There are many superb technical papers and articles, a few of which are relevant here. I wonder why this subject is so often ignored; is it because the subject tends to be more mathematical? The Supplier Directory, on the other hand is less than satisfactory.
This is the web site for two magazines, the German-language EPP and the English language EPP-Europe. They are not translations of one another. The Home Page is free from publicity, but the download time is not brilliant,notwithstanding. The subject matter includes all aspects of electronic packaging and testing. There is an impressive list of articles that can be freely viewed. I note that some of them on RoHS are especially caustic, showing that made in Europe legislation is no more acceptable in EU countries than elsewhere. There is even a “technical article” on industry jokes of the style A number of different approaches are being tried, meaning We are still guessing at this point.
It’s a long time since I looked at Global SMT & Packaging’s web site, run by a former member of the editing team of this journal. Like most of its transatlantic brethren, it is too heavy and slow to download, totalling well over the 200 kbyte mark, taking a full minute and a bit to download on my DUN system. Although it places its emphasis on the assembly side of packaging, there are useful titbits (perhaps I should say tidbits, lest my American friends be shocked!) for the readers of the present periodical. The quality of the technical articles is well above average for this kind of magazine, whose printed version is still a “freebie” for members of our industry. Other than the download time, my only “beefs” are
the design of the Articles menu, which stretches over three whole pages width, until you click over an item, and is partially hidden by graphics; and
the links to the articles and editorial items are rather cluttered and their introduction is too short to give the surfer a good idea of the subject matter.
For example, does Over the past two years, I have written quite a … (more) convey enough information to make you want to click on the link? There is a useful “Directory” (Buyers’ Guide), if slightly unusual. A first selection of category is made from a choice of nine headings in the menu, three of which are useful for PCB fabricators. This leads to a listing of all the companies in the category plus a menu of sub-categories, which shortens the list. Having chosen a candidate, this is linked to a short company profile, with a further link to their web site. Quite clever and useful for sorting the wheat from the chaff!
How can I conclude this examination? On the whole, magazines’ online web sites are useless if you are not one of the lucky 10 per cent or so users in the world with some form of broadband. To illustrate this, I spent an average of nearly 50 min at each of the sites reviewed here, much of which was simply waiting for some page to download. If you do have broadband, be it DSL, cable or satellite, then these web sites are worth looking at, if you don’t have access to the printed copy. Most of these magazines offer useful news items and commercial information that might otherwise be difficult to find. The quality of the published technical information is quite variable, even within one magazine. Some of it seems obvious to anyone working in the industry, whereas other items are very informative and valuable. The regular columns in some of the magazines are equally variable from readable to very interesting. However, it may be that some magazines are pitched at different levels of readers’ background, so some discrimination may be called for to suit the individual.
STOP PRESS: After 5 years and 8 months of patiently waiting, since my application, I had just finished the last paragraph when the doorbell rang; it was the guy from my ISP come to install ADSL, albeit only 1 Mbit/s maximum, the fastest affordable possibility here. After it was working, I cleared my browser cache and downloaded the same URLs as catalogued in this article. My reaction: WOW! However, I’m not taking back one word of what I’ve said,even though I can now download even PCB007’s Home Page in exactly 11.4 s;there are still millions of surfers condemned to slowdom, if I may coin a word!
Brian EllisCyprusbne@bnellis.com
Notes1. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II, vi.2. I prefer using milliard rather than billion as being unambiguous for 109, billion in the UK meaning 1012.
