So we surveyed these websites, see

The problem with hard copy publishing is that, by the time the word is out, the story may have changed. For example, Slowly does it for retailers' websites.

A Nielsen Online study - looking at the discrepancies in download times for major retail home pages - has found that some "new" pages took almost 10 seconds to download.

Retailers including The Warehouse, Whitcoulls, Noel Leeming and Trade Me were among those in the survey, which found that the average response time during February was 5.4 seconds.

Noel Leeming, which came in at a time of 9.57 seconds, was the slowest.

Just checked it, impressively fast at less than 2 seconds for all pages.

The Whitcoulls home page was second slowest, taking 8.42 seconds to download items.

Or under 3 seconds to load their home page now.

The fastest response time - at 1.6 seconds - was shopping site www.1day.co.nz. Noel Leeming management said the slow loading time to their website was a result of increased traffic to the site.

What has made a huge difference is that, finally, these guys have discovered html instead of putting their catalogues (literally, unsearchable images of the print catalogues, online. If you want to see how bad THAT can be, try Briscoes who still insist on doing it, although even there the load time is under 3 seconds, its just worthless as a website.

Seems like Nielsen may be wasting their time (and someone's money) preparing the report, maybe they should just have real-time feeds on their home page, which incidentally, takes 3.4 seconds to load at my place.