Obsessiveness about Speed
Point #5 - Speed kills. Except on the Web.
I’m pretty obsessed about load times and simplicity. The new iBegin design (which I mentioned in my last post) is very focused on simplifying the site so it truly feels like a search engine.
At the same time, I was looking at the frontpage’s HTML and was not too happy. The original CSS and then the subsequent tabs were done by two separate people, which meant there was a bit of overlap and waste. So when I stumbled into the brilliant Websites as Graphs and saw the soup that was iBegin, I was none too pleased.
So we went back to the drawing board, and the design was re-sliced and the JS re-done. The net savings were roughly 1.7kb. The HTML was shrunk by roughly 1kb, the JS by 1kb, but the CSS grew 300 bytes.
Using the Website Graph, the page structure also came out simpler:
Old/Current page
New page.
You can clearly see the newly done page has a lot less nodes. Less nodes = I’m a happy camper.
I had a friend of mine do some pageload testing from Ottawa (the servers are in Toronto). The time to load went from an average of 0.560 seconds to 0.485 seconds. That comes out to roughly 15% faster.
On a related note, I am hoping to have the new design and V2 of the Googlemaps API implemented in roughly 2 weeks.