Boo programmers had made extensive use of Macromedia Flash animations. In addition to the painful delays encountered when loading the sequences, the coup de grace was agonizing failure to breakout of the broken Flash routines. At the time, I was using a 56kbps v.90 modem connection. The Boo designers constructed the site for a small audience with infinite bandwidth. As surfers gain experience traveling around the web, when shopping, they have less and less patience for pages to load.
Recent studies peg the magic number at eight seconds.
If the casual surfer visits a site for the first time and fails to assimilate information after eight seconds, they leave in frustration. With so many good websites, there is no shortage of sites filling this simple requirement. The impression was negative in spades . The shortage of profit from sales and advertising revenue means more and more sites quickly burn through IPO funding in order to keep the lights burning and the bandwidth bill paid. The primary reason it heads my list is its telltale characteristic sluggish loading of the homepage.