Building a Lean, Mean, Quick, Web Machine!

Building a website can be a time consuming process. If you use the wrong kind of assets in building your site, it will become a exercise in patience and anger management. Here is a few simple tips to keep that site light on its feet, easy to build, troubleshoot, and maintain.


Small pages = Fast pages

The art of building a site that loads quickly and is quick to transition is a tricky one. no matter a persons connection speed there is always content to download. How frustrating is it when you go to a page you want to view only to have to wait sometimes, what seems like forever, for content to load. We have all been there. (modem era anyone?) Do your viewers a favor, keep those pages small no more than a couple hundred kb. (yes you can still have images and content and keep it that small)


Its a Web page not a Novel

When creating your own website its quite the challenge not to start channeling your own inner Tolstoy. You just created a soapbox your going to want to stand on it, especially when you are passionate about your content and want to make sure people get every bit of info your putting out. Writing for the web is different from writing for print. People view the web from their mobile devices or at work more often than not, they skim. Get to the point, you'll be happy you did.

Navigation, my Kingdom for Navigation!

Navigation on your website is what gets your consumer around your site. Having good navigation is essential, and is probably the easiest thing you can do to improve user satisfaction.

Keep those JPEG's small people!
Small images are about the download speed more than the physical size. Beginning web designers often create web pages that would be wonderful if their images weren't so large. It's not okay to take a photograph and upload it to your website without resizing it and optimizing it to be as small as possible (but no smaller). Remember the internet runs at 72 dpi. so a huge 5000dpi image from your new camera will make no difference when it comes to online all you will end up doing is slowing down your site considerably.

if you have access to programs like Photoshop or Gimp there are options when saving out your content called "Save for Web and Devices" keep those images to under a 100k whenever possible.