Monday, January 3, 2011

Optimization

Website optimization is important to any web page you create. It cant not only help out those people who are still unfortunate to have high speed Internet (still people who have dial up) but it can also help to keep your bandwidth down if you are getting close to your limits.
  • Images - Optimize all pictures using your favorite photo editor. Scale all of your images down to the size you are going to use them and not in some ridiculous size your fancy camera shoots your photos in. Also, convert your images to either a gif of png. It's true, they are better for the Internet and load much faster than a jpg of bmp. Plus, png are more easily editable at a later date and time when you decide to do so. 
  • Logos/Navigation bars - Not very many people do this but I feel like it is true. Even though I have never tested this make any navigation bars and logos backgrounds of div tags instead. You can go ahead and try to do this yourself, but I can almost guarantee you that it will load faster. The unfortunate thing about this is that when a user decides to print your site, these things often don't show up. There are ways to get around this but I won't get into it in this article.
  • Mobile Version - Many sites, including a lot of my own, have been seeing in their sites an increase in the amount of page loads from smart phones. If you see your site is starting to lean this way check it out on a mobile phone. You might be surprised by how much of a pain it is to navigate. Instead, fix it and make sure it loads on those quickly and good looking. 
  • Auto expanding backgrounds - If you have backgrounds that auto expand and repeat make sure that they are only 1 pixel wide. Why create something that is bigger then that, its going to look the same anyway. This will speed up your backgrounds tremendously in your optimization effort.
  • Clean up inefficient script queries - No one likes waiting around for a script to finish each time a page loads on your site. Instead clean up that query that loops 40,000 times each time a page loads. This will also allow more people to connect to your website at a given time.
Website optimization will improve the speed of your site tremendously.  It is also something that cant be learned overnight, but it shouldn't be taken lightly either. Fix your webpage day by day and eventually you'll have a site that even an ancient dial-up modem can handle.