Posts Tagged ‘Web’

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Slow Loading

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

I’ve been helping a friend of mine in the redesign of his web presence, well, less on the design end and more with development.  Today he came to me with a grave issue, his site was slower than molasses.  In the vast world of the Internet, nothing is worse than a slow loading website.

Both my site and his new site are powered by WordPress, so I instantly checked mine to see if it was an overall WordPress issue. When it wasn’t, I immediately blamed his hosting provider, but thought better of it once I checked a static page on his site.  I then recalled that we were using some javascript to make his portfolio section nicer, but that shouldn’t have slowed the admin section as well.  Just to be safe, I removed it.  Nothing happened, so I set it up just so it would be served up on the portfolio page, not all sections of the site.

So to resolve this issue, I set off to my trusty Google search.  The majority of talk on the web about slow WordPress mentioned version 2.6 and/or faulty plugins.  Since both our sites are above 2.6, I deactivated all plugins, but nothing happened.  Now, I was just puzzled.

Then I remembered that I had added some code to my site’s htaccess file to optimize loading using GZIP compression.  Following the instructions on BetterExplained, I brought the load time down from 19.74 seconds to 2.9 seconds. This little trick should work for speeding up your site’s load time in all modern browsers.

Other resources for checking and increasing site speed:

Pingdom.com’s speed test

Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Yahoo’s YSlow add-on for Firebug in Firefox

Vladimir Prelovac’s WordPress Optimization Bible

Important Consideration: When ever troubleshooting any issues with a site’s speed check out the host’s official status, for example DreamHost’s status page or HostGator’s Twitter. Make sure to keep your own service’s status handy, it can be invaluable!

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WordPress, CSS and Cross Browser Display

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Well yesterday I finally was satisfied enough with the updated version of my site to upload.  Of course, the result was not the nice and easy transfer that I was expecting since I decided to transfer my site to using WordPress as a CMS. All archived blog images broke, none of my links transferred, permalinks weren’t working; it was just an irritating time sink.

Obviously there is still work to do, such as adding my portfolio pieces, but what became most irritating was the fact that Safari was ignoring font-family, background, well generally everything on the body styling, when it appeared quite fine in Firefox, and Opera.

I spent the morning searching for a solution. I could find nothing about Safari ignoring font-family, which for me was the more important issue. I should have considered that the problem stemmed from the fact that all body styles were being neglected.

After a little experimentation, I found the root of the problem. WordPress’ theme information in style.css.

Read the rest of this entry »

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[Website] The Buckley House Restaurant

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
Screen Shot of bhrestaurant.com

Screen Shot of bhrestaurant.com

The owner of The Buckley House Restaurant initially approached me to develop a logo for the new restaurant, so this piece consists of both identity and web work. I also photographed the chef and restaurant space for the rotating images featured on the site.

An essential page for any restaurant is that which contains contact and directions, without it patrons would never be able to locate their destination. In this situation, I utilized Google Maps to allow site users the flexibility of obtaining directions tailored to their needs quickly and easily.

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Answers about Analytics

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

I include the free tool Google Analytics on all of my website development projects, as it provides clients with a good overview as to where people are coming from, how they got there, and what they hope to achieve while at the site.

Despite my love for this addition to my collection of web tools, I often misunderstand a great deal of information about it.  I sometimes lack a precise definition as to what each metric is measuring or how to really extend use of the software to get as much out of it as possible.

Fortunately, Analytic’s grandfather, Google search, has once again delivered.

Official Google Analytics Blog
Go straight to the horse’s mouth for the latest information and goings on with features and updates on their own software.  On a related note, never underestimate the power of the Help section.

Google Analytics Maximized: Deeper Analysis, Higher ROI & You
This more advanced article provides 9 tips for making you into an Analytics Empress/Emperor.  My favorite being number 8, make use of Analytics ability to provide information about internal site searches.  I had no idea this aspect existed and activated immediately on the sites I manage with a search feature.
Also check out the author’s archives on analytics for more insights to what you can learn from your implementation of Analytics.

5 Google Analytics Features You May Not Know About
A repeat of some earlier suggestions, however, the last tip cannot be overstated. Filter out your own visits. This is especially important if you check your site frequently, which you should, or if you have hired any one else to assist in the process.  Get the static IP address of as many of your internal visitors as possible and filter them out now.

Google Analytics Interface Tutorial [YouTube]
An often underutilized place to find information on just about any topic is YouTube.  This video tutorial is a good overall introduction to Google Analytics, perhaps a nice link to send to clients unfamiliar with the software.  Although, I do often revisit basic tutorials on all of my skill sets as more technical documents may overlook basic features that I may have never heard of during my initial research.

Update, a wonderful article from Smashing Magazine:
A Guide to Google Analytics Tutorial and Useful Tools
Covers more angles than I thought existed. The review of tools provided extends the usability of Google Analytics.

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Web Design from the State Perspective

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

An interesting assessment of web design over the past through years via the lens of US state web sites:

US State Tourism Web Site Design: Two Years On

My beloved home state of Maryland did have perhaps the most shameful before:

Maryaland's website before

Maryaland's website before

Maryland's Website After

Maryland's Website After

I recall seeing similar visual and functional upgrades across various sites back home, perhaps my favorite being: www.marylandstatefair.com. Before this update it was quite a mess, and very difficult to use. Now visitors to the site can submit entries to the fair online, which is quite useful for college students attending school out of state. But perhaps my favorite feature, that despite all the glittery imagery, you can still read the whole site with images disabled, a vital element since parts of Maryland still lack a high speed Internet provider.

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