Website Optimization Measures, Part III

Jens Meiert, March 17, 2008 / May 5, 2008.

This entry is filed under Web Development, Usability, Design.

Recent weeks still meant a lot of work on this site, despite my activities in Oldenburg and a neat cold. So apart from inspiration to publish a more “generic” optimization guide it suggested itself to write another part for my extraordinary Website Optimization series, especially since it already had a nice start with parts I and II.

Featuring more articles on home and archive pages. Thanks to some SEO considerations, no, inspiration by Jared Spool, I decided for more “link richness” on my website. Although I am looking for load time and performance optimization almost everywhere, a handful more teasers don’t mean a problem – instead, featuring 10 instead of 5 publications per homepage or archive document definitely supports “orientation”.

Checking and updating ping service lists. If I was a traffic-generating machine, I’d probably make a different article from that, but ~~I don’t~~ not now. Browsing hypertext I found a few sites that advertised several ping services I didn’t include in my WordPress conf yet, so I thought it might be useful to check services I pinged before as well as those being advertised. Anyway, I ended up with a new list probably helpful for you, too (comment otherwise, please):

http://ping.bitacoras.com/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2F
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2Fen%2F
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2F
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2Fen%2F
http://ping.myblog.jp/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

Fixing WordPress and WordPress plugins. My favorite. I noted problems with blockquote element nesting a few months ago and finally managed to fix that by patching functions-formatting.php (WordPress connaisseurs will notice that this is a file from a former WP release). I also fixed the faulty yet broken del/ins element handling in xhtml-strict-10.php of Jamie Talbot’s X-Valid plugin. Anyway, if you’re using an earlier WordPress 2.x release and/or Jamie’s plugin and want to get rid of these problems, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
Checking and improving WordPress blog security. Evidently, this is something every WordPress blog owner doesn’t love but needs to do. Now that I still did not update my installation I instead watched out for additional information on WordPress security and felt at least inspired by Frank Bültge’s WordPress security tips (in German though).
Trying to fix layout grid (when it’s broken). Mine was, and still is, so feel free to name this point pointless However, I failed in fixing this site’s grid because I didn’t take enough time to plan it upfront. I stopped all efforts to repair it because it wasn’t “too broken”, you barely notice the problem anyway. Lazy like I sometimes am I end this “improvement attempt documentation” with a quick reference to a “layout grid” Google search.
Playing with types. I played with certain fonts and decided to switch to Cambria as the main type. Skipping worthwhile arguments that lead me to Cambria I am instead referring to this order of fonts I now feed meiert.com visitors’ user-agents with: cambria, palatino, georgia, 'bitstream vera serif', serif; For what it’s worth.
Adding more prominent update information. Discovering a few sites that concluded that some of my articles must be outdated just because the URI contained an older date finally forced me to at least show update information at the top of the page as well. Thus, “last update” is not just mentioned at the end of the page but also in the “intro” element below the heading, when appropriate, for example “Jens Meiert, April 1, 2007 / March 17, 2008”. Adding “~~[…]~~, updated March 17, 2008” appeared to be even clearer, but a quick usability test revealed that people tend to understand nonetheless. While additional tests will make sense, I’ll observe now whether or not people see that I take care for older articles. I do, and I do add notes when publications really got “deprecated”.

This has been quick again, especially since I changed many other things as well and found so much additional evidence that the best weapon to improve maintainability is to remove complexity – but, we already had that, huh?

This has been the third part of an open article series. Currently there are three additional articles on website optimization, part I, part II, and part IV.

Enjoy some popular posts, probably including contemporaries:

Comments

On March 17, 13:21 CET, Robert said:

Have you ever noticed any substantial benefit from pining such a plethora of services vs. just the established ones like ping-o-matic and a few else?
On March 17, 18:52 CET, Jens Meiert said:

Hi Robert – to be perfectly honest, no. It is on my agenda to check the results accordingly, but I don’t own any reliable information on that yet … As a matter of course, the outcome needs to be “significant” to tolerate the noticeable delay in posting speed, for example.
On March 18, 13:38 CET, sunnybear said:

Do you want to light some issues of web page load optimization? There are a few services that can assist you in speeding up you website (also improving usability).

For example www.websiteoptimization.com and Firebug/Yslow
On March 18, 13:46 CET, Jens Meiert said:

Hi sunnybear, yeah, I know
On March 20, 15:28 CET, lynne said:

Good Morning, I have read over your changes and adjustments. You have a great site up and all i can suggest is to keep up with that security. I ran into 2.1.1 problem with one of my friends. A full overwrite for all of their older files and tons of exciting updates. That was a joy.
On March 21, 19:09 CET, Jens Meiert said:

Worst-case scenario, huh? I don’t even want to think about it, despite backups and SVN repository … Glad to read between the lines that everything worked out though?
On March 22, 13:17 CET, Markus said:

While you’re trying out differnt fonts, you might also consider to use small headlines instead of the italic fonts in beginning of the list. It might help a user much to get a faster overview through your posts, as they are usualy longer then the screen and to scroll. While giving a better overview for your auditory, you also might get an additional “+” at the search engines. They love or more then italic … and it would help google&Co to cluster your pages.
On April 1, 21:57 CEST, Gray said:

Website Optimization is seldom taken bit per bit…Your site explains it and shows examples of it in its links and content. Yes, link richness is a big plus to getting high page rank BUT I’ve learned never sacrifice web development for this requirement. Proper mix of elements in website optimization gets and makes your site valuable ( real and helpful content, link rich) and memorable (easy on the eyes, great page design). My apologies though, your site’s color isn’t just working- visually dependent people would like to learn but are either lazy or impatient. Will visit again soon!=)
On April 9, 22:35 CEST, Susan Shepherd said:

You’re right about having the “last updated” update to your page. I for one have been searching for sites like yours that will add to stock knowledge about optimization. Knowing that a page’s content has not changed or been corrected does put credibility to what is presented. I am learning on the job and getting the time to gather insights on how to make a company’s revenue earner (e-business) tops does help a whole lot. Thanks for not being selfish…
On April 22, 0:30 CEST, Jens said:

Hi Jens,

while you’re optimising your site, what about sprites?

I noticed that your smileys are single images - putting them in one image which you then reference through background-position further cuts down your page loading time.

Plus, if I surf to another page, my browser most probably has already cached the sprite.

Here’s an example of how we do it at Fairfax Digital:
http://www.smh.com.au/css/img/bg_weather.gif

Cheers,
Jens (in Australia)
On April 23, 20:38 CEST, Jens Meiert said:

Markus, that’s of course a question of semantics, and both approaches would work. I preferred to use a list here, where the important sentences are marked accordingly.

Gray, I didn’t really get the latter but concerning the former (link richness), showing more content and adding a handful more links does no harm but hopefully benefits, yah, everyone.

Susan, sure: After all, that point is about credibility.

Jens, good point, but it does not exactly fit here since (among other reasons) sprites would mean too much CSS code for too fragmented use (in the German section of this site, for example, they’re almost not used at all).
On April 24, 3:46 CEST, Jens said:

One more comment on sprites: Although I see your point (having almost no images anyway), I do think that even on your site a sprite cuts down loading time.

If you check out “High Performance Web Sites” (O’Reilly) the first and most effective measure to optimise your page load time is to reduce the number of http requests. Nothing beats that.

Hence for this page (as of writing) you’d be able to remove two http requests if you used a sprite.

“Too much CSS code”? It’ll be three lines for your three images, going into an already existing style sheet. Plus, I admit, an HTML element, possibly a classed span, that’ll replace the current inline image element.

Codewise, let you have 1k more, but time wise you’ll save two http requests.

After reading the book I mentioned I’ve started applying sprites to my private site too (far from perfect yet, but on the way - click on my name to check it out).

Jens Meiert

Website Optimization Measures, Part III

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