[thelist] [CSS] site re-design

[Simon Lee]

> We're about to re-design an image/table based dynamic website.
>
> Currently considering using as much CSS as is possible for this.
>
> site in question is www.splitsonline.co.uk
>
> its one of those sites thats just grown and grown and we need
> to reduce the download time.
>
> our log shows that NN4 is used by 1.5% of users, there's even
> 0.6% using NN3.
>
> This will be our first attempt at using CSS (for layout etc.)
> for a live website. Any advice much appreciated - should we
> scrap nn4 support etc? should we use an Iframe for the data -
> what are statistics for Iframe coverage?
>
Hi Ben,

Just to throw a spanner in the works -- you say you need to reduce
download time, and having had a quick look at the site I see that you
have tables and tables of data. Much of your information is pure text,
i.e. there are very few images, so I would compress the webpage on the
server before delivering it to the client.

This is easy to do on an Apache webserver (use mod_gzip, or use your
language of choice to compress the page with gzip), and this will have a
much greater impact than using CSS. I see you're using IIS, so I'm not
too sure how you do that with ASP, but I'm sure there's something out
there that does it for you.

On all our production web applications we enable this page compression,
and the results are pretty amazing -- one of our applications is a
property management system, and on a particular screen there can be a
table with 15 columns of data and 200 rows, all laid out in HTML. This
amounted to about 150k when not compressed, and when using page
compression, was reduced to about 15k, so you can see the benefit --
reduced server load, and quicker download times!

This page loads up like lightning even on a 56k modem, so you can
imagine our clients are quite happy with that!

I certainly wouldn't neglect your NN users at all, especially when
there's no real reason to do it -- apart from trying to use *new*
web-standards. Your users come first.

HTH,
sl
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Simon Lee

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