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10 Essentials for Building a Solid Web Site:
Speed
If your site is too slow, people will
leave before the graphics even load. Sometimes
when we encounter a graphics intensive site,
we will search for an alternative while that
page is loading. Your users will do the same.
Nobody likes a slow site.
You can increase your speed in many
ways.
Naturally you have to optimize your
graphics.
We recommend Macromedia's Fireworks
or Adobe
Image Ready. Make your files as small
as
possible without compromising too much
on
image quality.
Optimize your code. There are several
utilities
that will eliminate extra data from
html
files to make a page smaller in size.
Use
them on every page on your site.
Reuse graphics. Try to avoid creating
extra
graphics when you can use an existing
one.
A different graphic might make the
site look
a little nicer, but the existing graphic
has usually already been loaded and
is still
in the user's cache. On this page,
for example,
there is probably not one new graphic.
The
only thing your browser had to download
was
the html.
Last, make sure your server can handle
your
traffic. If your server can handle
10,000
hits a month, and you're getting 20,000,
do something fast. Either find a new,
faster
server, or mirror the site elsewhere.
There
is nothing you can do from a developers
perspective
to speed up a server. You can have
the smallest
graphics on the web, but your page
will still
take twice as long to load as it should.
If you aren't sure how fast your server
is,
find out. There are plenty of utilities
out
there that test server speed.
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