Speedy Web Optimization?
What is the general bandwidth/speed which the internet viewers of your website have in their vicinity? A long question, and the answer is not especially positive for developers: not very much bandwidth = not very much speed.
Our computers’ processors can only do so much, and they can not suck the information out of the internet “tubes” any faster than the communication companies can advance it from our sites.
Therefore, it is up to us to optimize our content for the possibility of slower-than-domestic speeds (do you think that Turkey has a lot of T1 access?) Fortunately, we can make our content compact enough that we may loose less of our impatient audience.
How do you do that? (I was hoping that you would ask that!) Nathan Shedroff has some very good ideas for this in his article “Recipe for a Successful Website: Performance.”
It is a pretty easy formula to follow of you have ever used Flash (animation) and Photoshop before. The formula as stated by Nathan Shedroff goes like this:
- GIF for graphics, JPEG for photographs
- Graphic styles of illustration and design (large expanses of colors)
- Vertical gradients vs. horizontal gradients
- Adaptive color palettes and small color depths
- Reuse of graphic elements
- Height and Width tags
- Interlacing JPEG
I am not going to explain all these to you but they can make or break your website. For the work that I have done with ad agencies, I can tell you there are a lot mistakes in this realm that are causing people to bounce from their websites. Ad agencies that have little or no prior experience with optimization techniques will find this info very helpful.
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