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right. The big photo of a professional at work beckoned visitors to stay and learn how they, too, could be as successful. Links to her main pages flashed when a vistor's mouse passed over them. She even featured a classy animated mailbox at the bottom of the page to encourage visitors to send her email. But something went wrong. When Margaret checked her web site visitor statistics after one week, she noticed most people clicked to her site, then clicked away after just a few seconds. No sales. Like many sites, Margaret's takes too long to load. The very graphics and programming tricks that seem so exciting are loading at a snail's pace on the dial-up connections 85 percent of her customers have. For a while there I thought all we needed to do was wait for a few months and most North American's would have fast cable or DSL hook-ups. Even the fanciest sites crammed with eye-popping graphics would download in a breath. But Wall Street's telecom melt-down has all but sealed our fat- pipes fate. It looks like most of us will be using dial-up to get on line for several more years if not another decade. Here's what you need to do to get on the right side of this important trend: Step 1. Start cutting. Right now you can't do better than to scale back the time it takes your site to load. Last year Zona Research estimated 40 percent of sales were lost due to customers who left a site early after waiting on slow web pages. That translates into $21 billion in lost sales. If you've visited the FedEx site lately to track a package, you may have noticed their pages come up much faster. Now pages download in less than two seconds. Big sites like FedEx have special server tricks up their sleeve, but some of the time- cutting things they do will work for anyone. Step 2. Reduce those graphics. FedEx took the big jpeg file photo off the page and replaced with a much faster loading gif file graphic. Jpeg files, commonly used for photos, require thousands of colors. A gif file, used for drawings and simpler graphics, can be compressed to include only a few colors. Think of your favorite cartoon character. Chances are he or she is created with a just a few colors, maybe as few as two. That translates into a graphic that downloads fast. A designer confided you can get killer graphics with just 16 colors. FedEx made their pages speedier by replacing the little graphics next to links with HTML dots. The old graphics popped onto the page one by one. Done tastefully, the dots appear instantly and look just as good. For outstanding examples of just how good plain old HTML can look, see http://www.the5k.org The site is dedicated to clever designers who create outstanding pages all under 5k. Even on the slowest of dial-up lines, these pages load in less than a second. Step 3. Bag the Java. Java enabled links that change their look when you wave a mouse over them require three different graphics to work. A visitor's computer also has to take time to interpret the Java code. Use non-Java links instead. Also reconsider those Java scrolling news headlines. They also take time to load. CNN took their Java ticker down, making their page load faster. Visitors never missed it. Step 4. Cut down on links. Lots of sites have a big thick forest of links at the bottom of each page. It's doubtful many visitors even see all of these. If you've got more than ten links, you have too many. Cut some out and watch your page load just a bit faster. While I'm all for copy-intense sites, very long copy can make a huge difference in how fast a page loads. Keep your text at around 300 words on the opening page. Inner pages can be longer. Step 5. Repeat graphics. One of the best ways to speed up your site is to use the same graphics on every page. Once a graphic has loaded, it doesn't have to load again. I like to have a medium-sized logo at the top of the page, then a small logo at the bottom. It adds color and personality to an otherwise plain page, giving your site a feeling of continuity. Once you've paired down your pages, try comparing them to your competition. Clean out the cache on your browser, then time how long it takes your page to load. Now time how long it takes for competitors' pages to load. Results will vary from one user to the next, but you will get a pretty good idea of where your pages stand.
This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al. APIs and data portabilityThe blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail. Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:
A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail. Caching is good contingency design practiceAs I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible. A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above. And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 |
More Articles:1. Small Business Website Design - How to Get Professional Results on a Shoestring Budget By Michael Turner Just because you are a small business with an even smaller website design budget, does not mean that you cannot have a professional looking website and presence on the web. All it means is you will have to do some of the work yourself instead of paying some design firm to do it for you. Amazingly enough, self designed pages from small business owners who did their research frequently end up being better and more focused than professionally designed pages. Consider the following suggestions whe… 2. User Experience and Search Engines: If Your Home Page Could Only Talk By Kimberly Krause Berg Dear web site visitor.I can’t tell you how glad I am that you found my website. You have no idea the great lengths we’ve gone to get you here, let alone what we’re about to do to keep you on this web site.First, let me say, I have no idea who you are, or why you came, but believe me when I say, I built my site just for you. My company and products are the best there is to offer. You can find everything you need to know about me in my About Us page (it says “us”, but there is only me, really. I… 3. How To Improve The Professional Look And Feel Of Your Website By Titus Hoskins Projecting a professional image is paramount to your website's success. It can make or break your online business. Use this handy article and links to improve the professional look and feel of your site.First, take a general overview of your site. What is subject matter of your site? Define it down to a particular topic -- your niche.For instance, you can have a website on Sports. You may have narrowed it down to a particular sport; say baseball. You may have narrowed it down even further… 4. Your niche on the Web The Internet is vast with millions of new web sites being added weekly- How do you stand out in this crowd? This is topic we are going to address in this article. An understanding of which is crucial for your Internet success. The answer is rather simple - To make the crowd smaller! It is easier to stand out in a small crowd than a big crowd! Therefore you need to get away from the crowd and go to your niche! On the Internet this translates into building and marketing your web site only for a s… |
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