fig 1.1

I pulled up the quicktime site the other day, in hopes of upgrading so I could see the fake star wars trailer (yeah, it's the little things in life...).

When I arrived at Apple - QuickTime I was treated to a particularly egrerioius world wide wait situation. Even at 8 seconds I still didn't have the button I needed to click to upgrade (see img 1.1)

If they had only used alt tags on their navigation bar, not only would they have made the site accessible to the blind, they would have also let me know what to click so I didn't need to wait for those darn gifs to load. There are actually a lot of reasons to use alt tags, including getting better placement with search engines.

fig 1.2

At 22 seconds, I had the entire site (fig 1.2). The channels on the right came in last. Hope they didn't plan to make money off of those.
Honestly, is this site really so beautiful I needed to wait for these images to load? One could say that quicktime is aimed at high bandwidth surfers only. But that would mean they are ignoring 93% of the web audience. Sounds like a bad business strategy to me.