Influenced by my first blank website, I decided to make a loading page that never actually loaded. Slightly ironic considering I'm using Flash - my family has had broadband for less than a year, so seeing large, broadband only flash sites that just sat there and never loaded was a frequent occurance at our house.



This scene is made using a movie clip for the percentages (yes, I had to sit and type each one out). They start off being 1 frame each, sometimes two to make it look authentic, but gradually the number of frames between numbers get longer and longer, until it gets to 78% where the movie actually stops, but because I used a stop command, users will be sat there waiting.

The loading bar is an animation. I had to estimate how far the bar should have moved by certain percentages, in order to make it run at the same speed as the percentage counter. For example, the first keyframe is at frame 25, the next at 40, the next at 50, etc. Between each keyframe the animation is tweened to provide a smooth movement. I included the bar because it is a standard feature for loading pages - the internet is afterall a visual place.

I chose 78% for the animation to stop because it's over halfway, and I know (from experience) people will normally wait after 50%. 78% is also near enough to 100% to encourage you to wait a little bit longer - it's almost there. Also, 78% is at frame 775, which at 12fps, is just over a minute of waiting. On average, people will navigate away from a page if it isn't loaded in 30 seconds. How many people will have got bored before the first animation in my site is "loaded"? As in many net art pieces, the patient user is rewarded.

Of course, there's a sneaky alternative...

At the bottom, I have included the text "patience is a virtue" at the bottom. Frequently on sites that take a while to load the author puts messages like "It's worth the wait" to encourage people not to close the browser. Of course, the irony here is that the longer you wait the more you are wasting your time. I included this because I've frequently seen little "jokes" on net art pieces that work at the expense of the user.

In this case, when you hover over the right side of the text, the word "not" appears, changing the sentence to "patience is not a virtue", which is true in the case of this loading page. This rollover is a button will link to the next page.