Best Practices For Faster Web Sites

Before the Web I produced TV commercials. We would sometimes spend all night in the edit suite perfecting the sound mix. But we were not done until we tested the sound on a old TV set speaker. If it wasn't acceptable we would start over. We recognized that not all of our customers had the latest TV gear. We followed the principals of "user-centered-design."

I've produced Web sites for 15 years. In the "old days" it was routine to test new Web pages on a dial-up connection. Today few developers have access to dial-up for testing. Yes you can load test and calculate the time to render a page on different connections but you'll miss the look in the developers eyes while he stares at the screen waiting for a page to render. It's a good way to ensure that developers experience their work from the customers point-of-view, all customers.

So the next time you're told by a developer, "oh it doesn't matter, everyone has broadband" take away their broadband for a week and make then read this book while waiting for their pages to load.

Steve Souders, Web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, has just published a followup to his bestselling book, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers.

In Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers, Souders and eight expert contributors provide "best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories: JavaScript-Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more. Network-Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster. Browser-Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques."

In addition, Google has started a "Let's make the Web faster" initiative. See their tutorials on the many ways to make Web sites run faster. They present performance best practices that the better Web professionals use routinely to improve the user experience for millions of users.

Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and experience at Google recently revealed that Google's research team, experimented by adding artificial delays to their search results to see their effect on users. "They found that even a 400-ms delay would make the users conduct fewer searches by 0.2 percent to 0.6 percent." This of course could cost Google hundreds of millions of dollars. So what would a three second improvement in your page load time achieve? 5% more page views - 5% more revenue?

Not sure if your Web site was built to be accessible by all your customers? Are you building a new Web site and want to be sure that the business requirements include best practices for the best user experience? Contact me, I can help.

Mature Adults Gravitate to Vibrant, Single-Image Ads

Mature consumers prefer single-image advertisements over ads with multi-image collages by a margin of 66% to 34%, and also gravitate to images that show products and lifestyles, according to a recent image-preference survey by Creating Results.

The older a consumer, the stronger his or her positive feelings for images in which the model’s face was clearly identifiable vs. cropped photographs. 76% of those over age 75 preferred recognizable photos, as well as 75% of 65-74-year-olds and 62% of those ages 55-64.

Yet another factor to consider for user centered designs.

How Smart Web Design Can Strengthen Your Brand

In recent research, User Interface Engineering has been measuring brand engagement -- looking at a person's feelings of loyalty, confidence, integrity, pride, and passion, as it relates to

a specific brand.

They've discovered ways to tell how these feelings change when using a Web site, service, or product. They have learned that large logos and consistent color schemes have little effect on how engaged a customer is with your brand. Instead, the best way to dramatically strengthen brand engagement is by delivering a solid and delightful experience to the customer.

Read about their online seminar on branding research.

Long or Short Copy on Web Sites?

Jacob Nielsen addresses whether a site’s content strategy should use longer or shorter content.

The best answer: As long as it needs to be.

Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

Long or Short Copy on Web Sites?

Jacob Nielsen addresses whether a site’s content strategy should use longer or shorter content.

The best answer: As long as it needs to be.

Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

User Interface Testing At Google

Learn from Google. User Interface testing is the best way to make improvements to your site.


From Google: "From time to time, we run live experiments on Google — tests visible to a relatively few people -- to discover better ways to search. We do this because there’s no good substitute for understanding how real people, in real-world situations, actually operate. Theories are fine, but “improving the user experience” really happens best when we understand what people do online."


Official Google Blog: This is a test. This is only a test.: "Google comments on UI tests"