Singapore Web Hosting Blog

in order to make your web site load faster, besides image compression, using html authoring software, you can also optimize your html files. these are rather boring technical stuff, but will absolutely benefit your web sites.

* use CSS - CSS reduces the amount of markup in html, and you can put it as external file so that it won’t be loaded everytime.
* use valid markup - valid markups stop browsers from having to perform “error correction” when parsing the html.
* specify image and table sizes (height and width) - so that browser can display web pages before image or table is downloaded (as it can immediately determine the height and width of your images and tables).
* remove unnecessary stuff - leading whitespace, extra blank lines, comments…
* cut down on bells and whistles - cool javascript menu, buttons, graphics, music, animated gif, flash, etc. do they serve specific purpose there? or just for fun?
* split page into multiple pages if it’s too long - you have more pages at the same time.
* minimize the number of files referenced - so that the number of HTTP connections required to download a page is lowered.
* replace table-based layout with divs - if your good at CSS.
* avoid nested tables - if you have to use it.
* use external files - CSS, javascripts, etc.

goal: optimized file size - the total size of all the files of your web page (graphic, script, html, etc.) should be small enough to download quickly. get it below 30kb if possible. 20kb is better. smaller than 10kb is best.

i know many web designers will laugh at this figure. 30kb or 20kb for a modern web page? no way! my cool logo alone takes 20kb…

well, what’s the point if visitors do not want to wait for your cool logo?

pages that take forever to download is no. 1 of my top 10 web design mistakes.

looks like google never stops.

they keep launching new and fantastic products in the past year.

google earth, you can see the roof of your house! full of fun.
gmail, when all other free email providers gave 6 MB, google made a stir by giving 1GB mailbox.
google talk, google instant messenger, although not popular yet, it may imply google’s plan in VoIP, which is hot and there’s billion dollar potential here.
google video, they host your video clips, you can charge a fee from viewers or present for free.
google desktop, local desktop search tool using google search technology.
blog search, blog search engine.
google analytics, web site traffic analysis service, free of charge, known as Urchin before it’s bought by google.
google page creator, a new one just launched a few days ago, they host your web pages for free, and no ads! my god, we web hosting providers cannot survive anymore! luckily they do it on subdomain only, currently.

also, don’t forget applications that have been there for long time, i mean, 2 or 3 years, such as adwords, adsense, google toolbar, google PR, blogger, froogle…

then i heard news about gdrive, they provide hard drive to you!

in a presentation, google says that their philosophy to new product development is “no constraints” and they initially ignore “CPU power, storage, bandwidth, and monetization.”

they say that they should be able to “house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)” which leads to a world where “the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache”.

two concerns pop up when i read the story. first, privacy. yes i have been putting my trust in google so far from their very beginning. since we’re using so many tools from google, they can collect tons of information about us, some of the information might be down to personal level. they “do no evil” so far, from what i see.

but make my hard drive accessable to someone else? i have to think twice.

on the other hand, google has yet confirmed the gdrive concept, let alone any details, so let’s wait and see.

the other concern is, how will they monetize it? although they could ignore monetization initially when they develop the ideas, but they’re business, a listed company, they must think of their bottom line no matter what they do. so they must monetize it somehow.

put advertising on your desktop? not likely, coz it’s really annoying. charge a fee for the storage as backup? then why not just burn it on DVD?

anyway, they’re way smarter than me…

every now and then, i receive enquiries regarding speed of web page loading.

recently a client emailed me asking why their page had been very slow to be displayed, and his is in singapore. server load is fine. i myself felt that his page was indeed rather slow, although not using database, no java applet, no scripting, just static html, not very graphic intensive - in the surface.

when i looked at his files, the only image on the page was unbelievable 800+kb in size, while the html file itself was 200kb+. that’s 1MB+ data for one simple page, how can the page be loaded fast? it may take a few minutes to download if visitor is using dial-up, although not many people use dial-up.

but hey, even for broadband users, 1MB is way toooooo big for a simple web page. it’s very slow, and it wastes your hosting account bandwidth.

so how to make your web site load faster and save bandwidth? before i go into optimized html coding in more detail, let me address two things that might be so obvious that people ignore then often.

first, you have to optimize or compress your images. you cannot take a picture using digital camera and simply put it on your web page. you have to reduce image resolution, compromise image quality, and get optimized image files. the 800+kb image file above mentioned can easily be reduced to 100kb without noticeable quality loss.

if you use photoshop, choose “save for web” option to save the image file. there should be similar functions in other image processing software. or there’re online image optimizers, just search for it.

secondly, use web page authorizing software to code your web pages. i know microsoft word offers a handy function to export word file into html format and it looks fine on web site most of the time. however the problem is, it generates tons of rubbish code. in the example above, the html file can be reduced to 15kb maximum, which means more than 90% of the file is rubbish code.

think about it, and count all pages on your web site. if you do not optimize your html files and images, how much bandwidth you have wasted? and how many visitors you’ve lost because they do not want to wait?

oops, this post became longer than what i expected. will continue in next post.