How to Make a Fast Web Site

Or: How M$ is Screwing Us In It's Attempt To Own the Standard

The first secret to make a fast web page is to use graphics that are scaled and compressed appropriately. Use a Graphics editor (I recommend PhotoStudio) and save the image at 72 DPI with differing quality settings until the picture just starts to be degraded. Use JPEG (JPG) for photos and GIF for spot color illustrations.

For some reason, F500 (Fortune 500) companies are the worst at making huge web pages. Perhaps they are viewing their own pages over the company LAN and have no idea what the end user is suppose to suffer. Often you will see F500 pages with an image scaled to just 200 x 200 pixels yet the image is 80Kbytes. Now pity the poor user who is only getting 24000baud on his "54K MODEM. If there were no other web delays just the transfer would take 33 seconds - in reality with HTML protocol overhead server lag it can be closer to a minute. Remember too, that much of E-commerce is international - and they tend to connect with even slower hardware  (like used 486 computers with 14400 baud modems) and used routers from the states. Then the delays due to international links. Well you will lose these costomers if you dont think small data size.

Make sure that you don't force browsers to reload your logo on every page that is viewed - save it in only one place on your site and make sure it doesn't get duplicated. For some reason F500 web sites often force a reload every time you view a page - are some web master trying to inflate hits??

W3C Standards

I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but I think that W3C has done a very poor job with the standards. The latest standard is almost as bloated as M$. There is no reason to force people to define default attributes!  Why fill up the file with all this garbage unless it has a use? To depreciate <i> is just insane.

<i>test</i> now with html4 becomes

<span style="font-style: italic;">test</span>

This is NOT an improvement. It is as if M$ is now writing the HTML standard and filling it with bloat. I'm thinking of writing a HTML4 to HTML3 converter to strip things back to human readable html!

Other than CSS I think the standard has gone backwards. And even CSS should have been defined more tersely. There is no reason to use

<span style="font-style: italic;">test</span> for a style when it could be <s fs=i>test </s>

 If you want to define every last detail of the layout why not use PDF? html WAS intended to fix things up so they could be viewed on any display size and the coding was human readable and editable. At the rate that they are adding to the stack of hierarchy an html doc will be bigger than a M$ word doc in the next couple of standard releases.  

What happened to KISS? HTML WAS an elegant standard, but HTML4 is just a mess.

I remember reading that W3C wouldn't add an include command to html because it would slow things down - of course they missed the idea that if the information is on every page of the site it would make things faster as it would be cashed. Eventually there ways were introduced that are effectively an include, but not as a simple <include=src"http:domain.com/includefile> instead we have M$'s <iframe> and W3C's <object> tags, both of which don't work without breaking some mainstream browser. Both are also filled with bloated attributes we just don't need. The idea that we HAVE to HAVE Unicode (16 bits per character instead of the 8 we now have - for including foreign language characters) is also stupid - HTML will double in size again.

Gadgets

It seems that every web page designer can't resist putting animated graphics, needless Java applets, and other bandwidth wasters on the page. Avoid these like the plague if you want people to stay at your site, or if you plan to make any money. Research has shown that the flashier a page is the less sales it produces - users just get frustrated and find the next listing from the search engine or go back to their TV show.

Round tripping

M$, in their great wisdom, decided that they didn't want HTML to supplant the DOC format from M$-Word. So they came up with round tripping that allows one to save a word document as HTML and then open it in word again without losing any of the word formatting. Only one problem - it creates HUGE files with the HTML full of style attributes and more. If you want to strip out this garbage, you will spend forever going through the raw HTML. The page ends up 250 - 300% larger than a straight HTML version. I have written a Program that strips out most of the M$ garbage and allows you to start formatting again. (I hope to have it available here for $20 if I hear any interest from my readers)

If you use Word and FP copy your word file to the clipboard - paste it into NotePad, copy it from NotePad and then to FP. This keeps it from slopping in all the Word garbage that bloats up the files.

FP Themes are Your Enemy

If you use FP, under the page options/compatibility tab you should enable CSS1 and perhaps Frames and Java script only and then only if you really need it. Use KISS philosophy. Never use Themes - they will really complicate and slow your pages down. If you enable and then disable some of the other functions - formatting will appear yet never go away in the HTML file.

Evil Tags:<font><Marquee>

The <font>little attribute is nasty - never use it unless you have an extremely good reason. Also, be aware that <Marquee> is not part of HTML. Use H1, H2 etc tags to arrange your text and if the stock formatting isn't enough, use CSS.

CSS

If you want to add any flash do it with CSS - but be prepared to test in the last three versions of Netscrape and IE (Internet Exploiter) - you will find that browsers that are only 2 versions old will do many strange things with simple CSS formatting.

Frames

I like frames when I view a site. BUT (yes there is always another but) some people get confused by them (don't ask me why) and search engines refuse to index framed pages. If you use frames you MUST have a non frame version for the search engines which will make site maintenance a real headache.

DHTML XHTML etc.

What is happening now is a battle to OWN a standard. Most of the changes are causing the pages to get larger and larger. M$ latest browser has many incompatibilities in it most likely intended to expand their market share. HTML with Style sheets works - works well in fact. There is no reason to screw up a good standard that can be hand coded on a text editor with these new ones designed by complexity junkies in order to obsolete what is there now.

If you want to help make a change about the M$ monopoly, call, write, or visit your elected officials on all levels and ask them to require any operating systems they purchase to be open sourced. Remember the Squeaky wheel is the one that gets greased - don't wait to be run over by the M$ wheel.

There is a real danger that M$ will PERMANENTLY hurt all of the internet by using up bandwidth that was supposed to make things faster with ever increasing sizes of the HTML. Some users will get PERMANENTLY turned off and stop using the web.  Think about it - a text editor runs about the same peed it did ten years ago proving someone's line that "Intel givith and M$ taketh away".  If M$ continues on course you will NEED DSL just to keep the web from getting slower. And the poor users that don't have access to cable or DSL will just stop using the web.

Web surfers can read

One thing that tends to link Internet users is their ability to read (Note the book sales focus of many successful enterprises). Would you want to read a book with flashing characters, background pictures that make the text hard to read, and other fancy garbage? I wonder if anyone has thought of offering well-written content instead?

Pull or Push

One last thing to think about: push-marketing. Telemarketing, bulk mailings, door-to-door sales men, SPAM, are all push marketing. It is old school, doesn't work with the Internet.  What you need to think about is pull-marketing. Trade magazines are pull marketing. People read trade magazines for the content - and end up being exposed to the adds - or some times are looking for the ads.

A successful web site should think of in terms of pull marketing. Banner ads have a dismal effect - get the content up that your customers want. After all most people will go to your site because they were looking for something via a search engine. They have knocked at your door- you don't need to shove things down their throat or wow them with animations. Get them the information they need.

BTW this page is about 9K and is maintained using FP2000 with SR1- (which sometimes introduces file:/// into the url of links and the check link function won't catch it! &!!$%# <heavy sigh> [note: One year later and this bug is still not fixed - time to take a good look at Linux]

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