[thelist] Page weight -- good examples of "light" sites?

Bob Meetin bobm at dottedi.biz
Thu Mar 27 08:48:09 CDT 2008


Barry et al,

To get a good feel for a site speed, visit:  http://www.websiteoptimization.com/

It loads pretty fast, duh?

Anyway my turn to chime in.  I have the dubious distinction of doing some subcontracting work with clients who use Contribute to edit content - and I recently inherited another of these sites.  Contribute is an uneducated beast. It will allow the client to force image sizes without telling them that they should be compressed first.  Several of the inherited pages are above 5MB in size, but no one is the wiser.

The other note, if you encounter a CMS like Joomla it will typically have a long list of built-in dependencies of CSS, JavaScript, templates, etc. which harrass both page size and speed. Speeding up one of these sites can take enormous amounts of hours going through the code, eliminating what is not needed and perhaps combining, compacting what is. 

The other observation I note is that many of the absolutely worst examples of speed I've seen come from sites where cutting costs seems to be the primary goal, i.e. the principal picks up a copy of some off-the-shelf design software and goes at it.

What's needed is education and the willingness to accept it.

-Bob

 





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