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What would you tell a web designer to do? **** off ! NO! not that !

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burbon

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May 14, 2010
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What advice would a server guy give to a webdesigner about how he designs his pages. Things that make the server like his page more. Things like whitespace, remove or keep, images combined into sprites or indivdual, http header tips, just making these up, there may not be anything, but i'm sure there is, isnt there?
 
Nothing really. Other than, we use LAMP (or WAMP) not IIS, code accordingly.

Use relative paths, no absolutes unless it is external to the the site.

Content is their domain, not mine.

 
Hi

burbon said:
Things like whitespace, remove or keep
Personally I hate such practices. In my concept the document has to be easily readable so next time when I ( or anybody ) has to change/debug something, to have a readable document, not a condensed mess.
burbon said:
Things that make the server like his page more.
Server ? If you want to please machines, better think to search engines instead.

Regarding the server, read Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site and try the YSlow extension for FireFox which analyzes a page according to the advices I linked above.

Feherke.
 
Things that I have experienced with users on my server and can recommend - remember that not everyone has broadband yet. You can build these huge, complicated pages that look awesome and have lots of junk on them, but if the page doesn't start loading in 5-ish seconds and is not mostly done loading in 15-ish you are going to get users that say the heck with it and click away.

Don't take the images directly off the camera and slop them on the webpage because you don't know how to edit images (mostly this applies to users with content management systems). Resize the image to 72 or 96 dpi and give it a physical size that will look nice on 800x600 - 1024x768 screen res. Lots of people still don't know how to change their screen res, but looking at my stats it's definitely getting better. Keep the file sizes below 50K if possible for opening pages so your opening pages load fast - give the user the option of whether they want to click on another page with more or bigger images that might load slower. I had a guy who was dumping 5 megapixel images on his homepage right off the camera and then was complaining that MY server was slow - he would have 3 or 4 of them on the same page!!

Format your overall page design to not exceed 1024x768. I used to say 800x600 but have found that not to be necessary over the past couple years. Users don't mind scrolling up and down much, but hate scrolling side to side.

Bigger flash, video, animations (other than gif), etc will slow down the system, use more bandwidth and put more load on the server in general. If you don't have a very fast internet connection going out consider what will happen if 10 users are all playing that content at the same time... what about 20 users?

Text is good, and text at the top of the page is better. Yeah it's hard to design that way, but some search engines don't look at your whole page and just start reading from the top and grab a chunk. Put your most important text and keywords near the top. Servers love giving out text too! If you make your text as graphic files and put it on the page the search engines can't read it, and it puts more load on the server to give out the graphics as well.

Avoid too many redirects and using pages that pop up and then flip to another page quickly - search engines hate that stuff.

As for hand coded stuff, I always like the whitespace and lots of comments on what's going on. The server really doesn't care about blank lines - each one is only 2 bytes to send out and it makes the job of future editors that much easier!

This is just some general mumbling - hope some of it is of use.... :eek:)
 
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