7 Tips to Speed Up Your Web Site and Capture Holiday Shoppers
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By :
Karen Scharf
Submitted
2008-11-18 17:41:22 |
The holidays will soon be upon us, and with them comes the rush, rush, rush of harried holiday shoppers. The holidays can be a stressful time.
When you add in the fact that the US economy has been a bit bleak, your visitors will be in no mood to wait endlessly while your dinosaur of a web page finally loads in their browser.
Avoid losing your hard-earned shoppers to the all-too-easy exit button with these 7 simple web site fixes that can be applied in one weekend:
For speed and accuracy, use CSS.
Replace your tables and table-based layouts with CSS versions. Tables, especially nested tables, slow down the load time of your pages and render differently across platforms.
Use simple navigation. Instead of using Javascript and DHTML to create roll over image effects, duplicate a similar effect with CSS and background colors.
Replace as much Javascript as possible with PHP or server side coding.
And while we're on the subject of PHP, eliminate multiple calls to your database. Use indexed fields and HTML data displays whenever possible.
Make sure all your images, divs, tables, rows and columns have a specified height and width.
When you leave out the height and width information, the browser has to load all the content in the background before it figures out what to do with it.
Clean up your code. Avoid excessive comment tags and white space which both add to overall page size.
If you're using a WYSIWYG editor, verify your source code before sending the file to the server. WYSIWYG editors are notorious for adding bloat to your HTML code.
And don't forget to clean up the code in any external files, including cascading style sheets and Javascript. Reduce your comment tags, eliminate excessive white space, and use shorter names for your classes, ids and functions.
Ensure that all of your HTML, XHTML and CSS code is valid. You may not realize that your code is invalid just by looking at your page, since most browsers can actually load and display invalid code.
Unfortunately, it takes a longer time to render invalid code, so the best practice is to verify before putting your pages on line.
Time to implement:
If you have an archaic table-based design (not all table-based designs are bad, only bad ones are bad), it could take several hours to create a new CSS page template.
Likewise, replacing Javascript with PHP and CSS might be a time consuming task, depending on your programming skills. However, tips 4 through 7 can be implemented in usually less than an hour. |
Author Resource:-
Karen Scharf is an Indianapolis marketing consultant who works with small business owners and entrepreneurs. She offers several whitepapers, free reports and checklists, including her FREE Can-Spam checklist and FREE email pre-flight checklist to ensure your emails get delivered, get opened and get read. Download your copies at http://www.ModernImage.com.
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