Web Optimization and why it’s important

With today’s technology, anyone can create a website but where these web developers fall short is optimizing the web page. Let’s face it, not everyone will be on a dedicated T1 line and the companies that do have a very high speed connection will usually be slower than a home user, due to the massive network traffic that the company faces every day. This is why the web developer must realize that optimizing a webpage is just as important as the design and functionality of the webpage. How many times have you gone to a webpage only to sit and wait for the page to load? I have many times and usually when this happens to me, I’m gone! The average user will normally wait for about 8 seconds and if the page hasn’t loaded by then, they’re off to the next site and you just lost a potential sale.

The key to web optimization is CSS, keeping your images small and to a minimum size and keeping the fancy flash animations down to a minimum. So how do I keep my images down to a minimum size and where does CSS come in to the picture? Simple! Import the images in CSS and attach the CSS class or ID to the table or DIV tag in your html code. By doing this, the image is only loaded once and will be in the users’ cache, in case the user views other pages of your website. This also goes for colors and fonts. By making classes in CSS for background colors, different fonts or even different font colors, you can bring down the loading times of your web page by reusing the class throughout your web page. Again, by using CSS in your web pages, your images, fonts and colors are only being downloaded once.

A very good technique to keep your image size down is to chop it up and in your CSS, you repeat the background. Depending on the image, you may be able to take a 1003px X 50px image and bring it down to a 5px X 50px size. Then in your CSS, you import the chopped up image into CSS, then you just repeat it. By using this technique, you not only brought the image size down dramatically, but also increases the loading time of you web page.

Another good web optimization technique is to tighten up your CSS code. Instead of writing the color #000000, you would write it like this… #000. By dropping the last three 0’s, you’re saving space, thus, keeping the size of the CSS file down. Another way to keep the CSS file size down is by having no white space. That means no spaces between your classes and ID’s. Anything you can do to keep the size of your CSS file down will dramatically increase the loading time of your website and will increase your potential sales.

Remember, size matters! When in doubt, go to the Worldwide Web Consortium website and check your site. The W3C are the people that make the standards for web pages and they provide free information on everything you can think of when it comes to web development.