Sept. 19, 2009
Until Lawrence Reed took over at the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE's website was an afterthought. It was in a state of disrepair for a decade. It never posted all of the issues of The Freeman. That is no longer true.
FEE now is content-rich. There is a lot of material for free on the site today. It will never catch up to the Mises.org site. It could have, but no one understood what Jeff Ticker was doing at Mises.org until he had captured the market. For as long as he is running the Mises.org website, no one will catch up.
FEE's site has improved dramatically on Alexa's ratings. The money that FEE has spent on the site over the last year has paid off.
Yet the site still suffers from booby traps. I clicked the Podcast link today. Up popped an error message. My screen locked up. I had to use ctrl-alt-del to escape. I went back. I tried again. It happened again. This should never happen.
I wanted to warn the Webmaster this morning. Not possible. I went to FEE's contact page. The page has only phone numbers: phone and FAX. This sends a message: "Don't contact us through the Internet. We are locked in 1990-era technologies." It's the wrong message for a Website to send.
Then there is page-load time. I use a cable Internet Service Provider. It's fast. It takes a FEE page at least 15 seconds to download. Some pages take 30 seconds. Note: a page has not downloaded until the vertical slide on the right-hand side of the screen is fully activated without locking up. By comparison, a page on my site downloads in two seconds or less.
In the archives, you can search for the name of every author who ever published in The Freeman. Click his name's link, and you get a page with links to all of his articles. Great! Problem: the list is alphabetical by first names. That's OK if you're looking for Ludwig von Mises. It's not OK if you are looking for someone whose first name is Robert.
The site is worth visiting. I recommend it. But the visit will be more annoying than it should be or could be.
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