Photo by Ruud

In our previous Quick and Dirty posts, we looked at speeding up and optimizing various aspects of webpage code, whether this is CSS, PHP or just shortening the amount of time it takes to generate XHTML code.

Now in this final installment, we’re going to look at a way to optimize page load times in general.

Speeding Up Page Load Time

There are many ways to improve the amount of time it takes for webpages to load. We’ve looked at using CSS shorthand to reduce the file size of stylesheets and how to write more efficient PHP code. Combining these tips will help, but there’s a lot more that can be done to speed up your page loads.

Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Yahoo’s list of 34 best practices (broken into 7 categories) to make your website lightning fast:

• Minimizing HTTP requests
• Use a content delivery network
• Add cache control
• Gzip components
• Put stylesheets near the top of your code
• Put scripts at the bottom
• Avoid CSS expressions
• Make javascript and CSS external
• and more…

Continue Reading

Even though this blog is relatively new, there have been many great web and graphic design-related posts in the last few months of 2008. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and look at just a few (21, actually) of the topics we’ve covered.

Tutorials

• DIY Online Incremental Backups
• BlogDesk Part 1: Publishing Posts to WordPress
• BlogDesk Part 2: Posting to ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine

I’ve written several posts about ExpressionEngine. Here are a few of the most popular.

• Javascript Templates in EE: Speeding Up Page Loads
• Easier Editing in ExpressionEngine and WordPress
• Learn ExpressionEngine in 2 Days

› Continue reading…

In the previous 2 weeks, we’ve looked at how to use CSS shorthand to reduce the size of your stylesheets, and how to speed up the development of HTML pages.

In this week’s quick and dirty set of tips, we’re going to look briefly at optimizing PHP code.

Increasing Site Performance In PHP

Unlike optimizing your CSS code, usually your main goal in optimizing PHP code is not to cut down on file size, but rather speed up the loading and performance of your pages.

Knowing the most efficient ways to get what you want accomplished in PHP can give your pages a boost as far as processing and loading speed.

Here are 3 tips to help you optimize your PHP code and make your pages load faster:

1. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4.
2. echo is faster than print.
3. Use echo’s multiple parameters instead of string concatenation.

Source: Reinhold Weber

Read all 40 PHP optimization tips

Is It Worth Optimizing My Code?

If you follow the above optimizations, just how much will these speed up your site?
› Continue reading…

Photo by Wardofsky

In a press release Thursday (Dec 11, 2008), the W3C has promoted the new WCAG 2.0 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines into the current recommendation.

The new WCAG 2.0 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (current W3C Recommendation) builds and expands on the previous WCAG 1.0 Accessibility Guidelines released several years ago.

The WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 Checkpoint Comparison is a great place to start if you’re already familiar with WCAG 1.0 and are looking to implement the new changes.

Building Sites With Accessibility in Mind

The nice thing about the new WCAG 2.0 checkpoint list is that it explains the reasons behind and benefits of each checkpoint.

It also explains how to meet these criterion, and also how to fail to meet them. This helps designers and developers to not just rigidly go by the letter of the recommendation, but rather, adhere to the intent.

I think this will make for much more accessible sites in the near future because it stresses building sites that meet the intentions behind the guidelines instead of just having checkpoints to meet.

What do you think of the new WCAG 2.0 Recommendation? Have you started using these on any of your sites?

Last week we learned how to save time and file size by using CSS shorthand in our CSS code. This week we’re looking at a tool to speed up creating your XHTML pages and files.

Each time you get ready to begin a site, you have to add certain things to each page:

• Document Type Declaration (DTD - XHTML Strict, Transitional, etc)
• Page encoding (UTF-8, etc)
• Link your stylesheets (CSS)
• Import/link your javascript library or choice

You may also add folders in your work directory for:

• PHP includes
• Images
• Flash
• etc

All of these things are pretty standard. Even those these things are pretty straightforward, making a new file, or copying and pasting from a previous project can take up valuable time better spent on the meat of the site code.

Generate Code With Deploy

I’ve been using an online tool called Deploy. This gives you a dead-easy way of choosing your DOCTYPE, linking CSS, importing the jQuery library (and common plugins) and creating common file folders.

It then generates the code in a nice ZIP for easy download. You can also bookmark the page and regenerate the code again without having to choose the options all over again.

Project Deploy is a great time-saving tool for any web designer.

Other Quick and Dirty Tips

• CSS Shorthand Tips
• Lightning Fast Page Setup

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