RE: OT: Web site speed

["Graham Howe" <graham@xxxxxxx>]

If you are talking about www.diy.com then I have to say I thought it was
pretty quick for a 'marketing driven'  site. I cleared out my cache and
loaded the page in under 20 seconds on ISDN 64k line. A lot of the content
that usually slows sites down (like flash, sound, animated gifs etc etc)
are
not present which is good, so the only real performance hit is the
graphics.
Most of the graphics seem to be small gifs with only a few jpgs so that is
not bad.

I don't believe that the marketers would allow you to strip off the photos,
but that would certainly speed up the page a bit. There is a fair amount of
use of gifs to represent words and of course if those words were instead
created using style based text then it would be faster. But the marketers
are again likely to put their foot down because they will want the specific
fonts and those might not be possible to accurately reproduce on the page.
The other problem will be that even the same font can be displayed at
slightly different sizes by different browsers, so to force consistent
appearance across browsers it is often necessary to resort to graphics. I
would say that they should check out the competition and see how their
pages
load, for example www.homebase.co.uk is much slower as they have several
photos on the front page, likewise the wickes site is pretty slow.

In summary I'm nt so sure there is anything that can be done without
removing a fair bit of the look of the page, but you may want to see if the
marketers would be willing to lose the fancy fonts and have all words and
numbers displayed as text (with appropriate styling) rather than graphics.

Regards

Graham

P.S. if there is any code or database interaction involved in actually
building the page on the server (looking at the source I suspect there is),
then you might want to look for any inefficiencies there as well. But to be
honest it loads almost immediately on a return visit, so it does appear
that
all delay is down to graphics.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Harrison [mailto:Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 12 October 2001 10:18
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: [ukha_d] OT: Web site speed
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> An off-topic request to all you Web gurus.
>
> B&Q are concerned that there web site's home-page takes too
> long to load
> (it does!)
>
> So the question is, what would be your recommendations for making it
> load faster? Bearing in mind that marketers control the look ;-)
>
> Not sure if this should be on-group, so feel free to email me
> direct if
> you prefer!
>
> Mark Harrison
> Head of Systems, eKingfisher
>
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