Mark Twain wrote ‘Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ Mr. Twain’s thoughts certainly applies to the website load time, today.

A colleague asked my why one of our websites loaded slower than other sites on the web. Being a conscientious sort of guy, I went to some online site speed tools and took a look for myself. Well, that’s when the mischief started.

See, the site I was worried about actually did really, really well in the tests. But that depends on how you look at the results.

Overall, we had an almost 90 out of 100 score. That’s great! We’d worked hard to optimize the site, and it shows.

Yet, in big bold letters, the test results also said that “Almost 80% of websites tested load faster than yours”.

Hmm. That’s terrible!

Or is it?

It’s all about context. Most websites don’t include rich media, and most websites don’t have as much going on as the one we’re running. Ours, for instance, has a huge video that plays on the homepage. Take that video out, and we load in under 5 seconds. Put that video back, and we of course load a bit slower. But for our purposes, having this video is vital to the website’s audience- and our business. It helps create actual conversions from the website. Take that video out, or speed it up by reducing its quality, and our audience will go away (yes, we A/B tested this), resulting in much lower conversions for that site. In layman’s terms, it’d make the site useless.

The best designs are created specifically for a site’s audience. Look at the difference between Google’s homepage and Yahoo!’s. Different audiences. Or the difference between a television show’s website and a typical corporate website. You design for your audience.

I say, who cares if a site loads 2 seconds faster if it doesn’t do its job of serving its audience. Raw load time and meaningless comparisons are just that- meaningless.

Yes, these website speed tools can be useful, but they can also be very misleading. Yes, take what they give you, and work to optimize your site. But it’s foolish to build a fast site for nobody. Find out what matters for your website’s audience, and cater to their needs, first.

Of course, there were a lot of other problems with most if not all of the online site speed tests. But that’s a topic for another day.

We’re proud to announce the completion of our new website for midwest law firm Leizerman & Associates, LLC. The website features a design that’s web standards compliant, and it includes the tools our client needs to maintain and update the website almost entirely on their own: a MODX content management system, and WordPress blog integration.

Most law firm website designs are pretty bad. But this client is special to us. I wanted this client’s website to clearly differentiate them from other, lesser, law firm websites. I worked closely with our designer on the project, Amy Gallaher-Hall, as she came up with a way to incorporate the high-touch, human-centric character of this special law firm with a cutting edge design that perfectly represents the client’s corporate and community culture.

We’re very proud of the work, and the client is thrilled.