Sites featured in articles like Worst Websites of 2010 often are redesigned, which explains why some sites mentioned in my articles don't match their current look. The Daily Sucker features current examples of bad web design which haven't been fixed (yet).
If you see a site that you think sucks, email the URL to me. No personal pages (personal pages are supposed to reflect the individual's personality and artistic freedom) or web site designers (it would look like a conflict of interest), or others of their ilk.
An old high school buddy, Terry Schill, came up with a brilliant take about recent Twitter events: “Not bragging, but all of my Tweets are going into the Library of Congress….who would have known?”
Definitely NOT The Daily Sucker.
The best part of the Twitter deal is that everyone can now legitimately tell people, “I’m an author. My works are in the Library of Congress.”
OK, you’ve found out your site’s loading speed sucks, what do you do?
There are lots of things you can do to speed up your web site. I think the three steps you can take that will improve your site’s performance more quickly (and perhaps have the greatest impact on your site’s speed) are:
Remove as many f*cking third-party widgets as your boss will let you. Steve Souders’ Performance of 3rd Party Content article states:”Ads, widgets, and analytics are a major cause for slow web sites. P3PC is a project focused on analyzing the performance of 3rd party content. The goal is to find the key wins to evangelize to make 3rd party content faster.”The two worst offenders on his 6-item list are: the Digg widget ad Google’s AdSense. Obviously, Google won’t downgrade you for using AdSense.
His list is far from complete (he’s just starting) and I’ve personally found that the Snap widget, Techmeme widget, Twitter Flash widget, and the Amazon widget that display books are all bandwidth hogs.
Cache your files— Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header. Yahoo! covers the topic. Information on how to do it is difficult to find and implement. Most articles assume you are a professional system administrator with root access.Here are some articles that I’ve found useful for normal people:
Compress your web page components. As Yslow states:”Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.”Here are articles that I’ve found useful for normal people:
Redbot is an important tool to help you see details about your site. Here’s what you see when you visit my articles page and here’s what you see when you click check your assets (really important).
The Google article lists various tools to help you evaluate your site’s speed. Page Speed and Yslow are two addons for the Firebug plugin for Firefox. These tools are extremely valuable because they analyze “web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance.” Performance is this year’s black.
Crappy looking sites. In my view, the problem with rewarding web speed is that lots of sites that are the worst sites and worst looking sites on the Internet might see an improvement in search results because they load faster.
Yes, I know that Page Load Time is a minor, minor factor. Still, it seems bizarre that crappy looking sites will get any kind of bonus for loading faster.
Since it’s my policy not to comment on web designers’ sites, I won’t comment on any of these 10 selections by iMediaConnecion. Let me just say “10 awesome agency websites” is their article title.