From the very beginning of starting a new website project, there are many factors to be considered. Speed of the site is one of these factors. It was extremely important years ago when internet speeds were about as fast as a cow, because basically if you wanted your site to be seen, it had to be fast. As internet speeds have dramatically increased, it has been easy to let slip the basic practices of keeping the speed of a site in mind. Designers tend to get caught up in focusing on the design aspect and feel safer thinking that with today’s internet speeds, it won’t make too much of a difference. However we’ve now found out that speed is going to become a factor in deciding website ranking within Search Engines, which is making designers and developers more aware once again just how important speed is.
A few little tips and tricks for keeping your site faster:
- Adding all buttons, icons and other bits and bobs into the one image file
- Reducing the amount of separate css/JavaScript files
- Using Fireworks over Photoshop where possibly to compress jpeg files (this was demonstrated at an Adobe workshop).
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