RE: OT: Web site speed

["Mark Harrison" <Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx>]

One thing I missed:

I take your point about being faster than the competition, but in our
view, it's not enough simply to beat the competition in this regard.

If "Joe B&Q Punter" ends up feeling that "the B&Q
site's slow" because
he's used to bbc.co.uk or altavista, then he only notices we're slow,
not that Homebase is slower!

Mark Harrison
Head of Systems, eKingfisher

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-----Original Message-----
From: Graham Howe [mailto:graham@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 12 October 2001 11:08
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] OT: Web site speed


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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