Website Optimization Measures, Part IV

Published on May 5, 2008 (↻ February 5, 2024), filed under (RSS feed for all categories).

This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development. And speaking of which, here’s a short treatise just about managing the quality of websites: The Little Book of Website Quality Control (updated).

Once again, though already covering a few weeks of various improvements, some of which have been implemented in Bremen, others in Zurich, all on some of my sites. Enjoy additional optimization tips, this time touching typography, usability, SEO, and performance.

Less detailed information than usual, but please keep in mind that this series of posts has to be seen as a loose log of measures I apply to my sites, rather than a comprehensive guide for more quality of other sites.

This is a part of an open article series. Check out some of the other posts!

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About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on September 30, 2021.

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m somewhat close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

If you’d like to do me a favor, interpret charitably (I speak three languages, and they do collide), yet be critical and give feedback, so that I can make improvements. Thank you!

Comments (Closed)

  1. On May 5, 2008, 22:41 CEST, Jens Nedal said:

    Hi Jens,
    Part IV has been the most interesting until now. I guess neither of those 4 points are actually used widespread, but should.
    I would also add minimizing of external scripts. Also the Yahoo!’s analysis of what slows and speeds your site loading can be a useful read here, since this lead to the YSlow extension for Firefox.

    It is interesting to see that there is alot more that needs to be done to make a site accessible, not only in readability, but also concerning speed of information delivery and consistent information delivery.

  2. On May 7, 2008, 9:35 CEST, Jens Oliver Meiert said:

    Cheers, Jens!

    since this lead to the YSlow extension for Firefox

    Well, I think that it’s nice that Yahoo made focus on performance more popular. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that YSlow is not “everything,” as some of the recommended measures do not necessarily apply to all sites (like CDN use) and, more importantly, as others are completely missing (code, image, HTTP headers optimization, &c.).

    Interestingly, Google seems to prove exactly that đŸ˜‰

    It is interesting to see that there is alot more that needs to be done to make a site accessible, not only in readability, but also concerning speed of information delivery and consistent information delivery.

    Right, and it makes things even more exciting!

  3. On May 7, 2008, 20:35 CEST, Duluoz said:

    Revising “title” elements, consistenly putting the site name last.

    I’ve always thought of a page as though its a subset or a chapter of a book where you’d list the title of the book, then the chapter, then the page, etc. But you are absolutely right in what you’re saying in terms of SEO and I have been thinking about this all wrong. It never crossed my mind to put the page title first before the site title, but it makes perfect sense when you’re looking through search results. How this simple concept has eluded me all these years is alarming. Thanks!  đŸ˜‰

  4. On May 13, 2008, 15:51 CEST, Richard Morton - QM Consulting Ltd said:

    Jens,

    Nice idea about the title element being composed according to a simple convention of reversing h2 and h1. I like that and will probably use it. Even if things get changed later it is an easy rule to follow and will help for sites with a lot of pages.

  5. On May 16, 2008, 7:18 CEST, John Faulds said:

    assemble the page title out of the h2 and h1 headings, in this exact order.

    Some would argue that the name of your site should only be a h1 on the home page and that on internal pages, the page title should be the h1 with the site title dropped back to something else (usually a paragraph or div so as to not interfere with the hierarchy of heading tags).

  6. On May 23, 2008, 0:31 CEST, Jens said:

    Hi Jens,

    I am very interested in your upcoming article about compression.

    My provider does not offer mod_gzip at all, and I’ve been trying to create a php-based “poor man’s” gzip without success.

    My main stumble points were that a php-based compression does not work with web-based services who spider the page (e.g. a keyword density tool), broke in IE7 and did not allow for my photo galleries using parameters in the url (e.g. 
index.html?photo=2).

    I wonder if you could cover this aspect as well, ie. what can I do if my provider does not provide.