Boston.com announced a redesign of their homepage. They describe it as a “cleaner, leaner homepage” Since I had copies of their previous homepages for my previous experiment (fetched from the Wayback Machine), I figured I’d take a look at what their homepage size has looked like over time. The size of just the index.html file (not counting embeded images, ads, etc.) looks like this:
and the homepage as I write this is 103,478 bytes. The big jump in 2008 I’m not sure if it was short term thing. (there were only four days of data for 2008, so it may not be representitive) and I don’t have any recent data, but the most you can say is they brought the homepage back to 2001-2006 levels.
I’m sure that keeping the homepage under control is a daunting task, politically. According to the boston.com mediakit the homepage gets about a third of the site’s total pageviews. I’m sure there is a strong motivation for all the editorial departments, and the advertising department to add just one more thing onto the page.