Nowadays websites contain a lot of elements, like images, videos, CSS style sheets, Javascript (including AJAX), etc. And with HTML 5 being supported by the newer browsers, it seems that the number of elements in a single page is only likely to increase in the near future. With that in mind, it is important to look at the current design of websites. Most of which are not optimized on the front-end at all.
Steve Souders, writer of the excellent books ‘High Performance Web Sites‘ and the soon to come out ‘Even Faster Web Sites‘, is stating that users are primarily waiting for websites to load because of the lack of optimization on the front-end. With a few simple best practices and minimal code changes, your website can load super-fast for your users. Remember: speed does matter! I am not going to repeat everything that Steve has been promoting, instead I am including (below) some of Steve’s videos where he is sharing a lot of his knowledge..
At the end of 2007 Steve Souders left Yahoo and joined Google where he continued working on optimizing websites. And a few days ago, on June 3rd, Google published a new Firefox extension called Page Speed and made it available as open source to the developer community! I highly recommend you to check this out as this tool has some really cool new features!
I hope you find this tool as useful as I have found it overtime, and do leave me your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks!
Videos
And now, as promised the videos. Each will take time to watch fully, but if you are in website development the time invested in watching these videos will be absolutely worth it!
High Performance Web Sites and YSlow
Life’s Too Short – Write Fast Code (part 2)
Nicole Sullivan: Design Fast Websites
Update June 9th: Even Faster Websites
On Google I/O, Steve Souders also presented his findings on how to built even faster websites.
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