Web Site Optimization: Maximum Website Performance

Web site optimization produces highly competitive web sites that out-perform on every measure; traffic, speed, conversion rates, sell-throughs, and, most importantly, return on your investment.

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First Impressions Count in Website Design – visual appeal, beauty and aesthetics, halo effect, cognitive perception, webpage judgments of credibility

Web users form first impressions of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second), according to Canadian researchers. In the blink of an eye, web surfers make nearly instantaneous judgments of a web site’s “visual appeal.” Through the “halo effect” first impressions can color subsequent judgments of perceived credibility, usability, and ultimately influence our purchasing decisions. Creating a fast-loading, visually appealing site can help websites succeed.

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Crop Images Contextually – image cropping techniques optimized jpeg gif & png graphics

Cropping and resizing your images for the Web is a common technique for creating smaller thumbnail images that download quickly. However, we’ve seen many sites that either use HTML’s width and height attributes to resize larger images, or minimally crop and resize their images to lose vital information (see Figure 1). A better way to create images optimized for the Web is to crop them contextually.

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Refactor to Improve Code Design – software refactoring code to speed up javascript, java, and flash execution, download speed and coding changes

Refactoring is the art of reworking your code into a more simplified or efficient form in a disciplined way. Refactoring improves internal code structure without altering its external functionality by transforming functions and rethinking algorithms. Consequently, refactoring is an iterative process. By refactoring your JavaScript, Flash, and Java you can streamline its size, simplify your code, and speed up download and execution speed.

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Sink the Splash Pages – improve bailout rates, credibility, and rankings by removing splash page screen

Splash pages are branding or branching pages that usually appear before the main home page of a site. Many splash screens are graphically rich to entice users to explore the site. Unfortunately, splash pages decrease credibility, traffic, search engine rankings, and web site performance. This article explores the effects of splash pages and offers some solutions to lessen the pain.

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Use Server Cache Control to Improve Performance – apache web server settings for optimized caching with configuration files

Caching is the temporary storage of frequently accessed data in higher speed media (typically SRAM or RAM) for more efficient retrieval. Web caching stores frequently used objects closer to the client through browser, proxy, or server caches. By storing “fresh” objects closer to your users, you avoid round trips to the origin server, reducing bandwidth consumption, server load, and most importantly, latency. This article shows how to configure your Apache server for more efficient caching to save bandwidth and improve performance.

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Get a Dedicated Server Hosting Your Web Site – web hosting dedicated host http compression server

A dedicated server is the next step up from a shared hosting environment. By moving to your own server you don’t have to worry about other sites slowing you down or crashing your server. Dedicated servers also give you total control over what software is installed your site, opening the door for additional performance gains.

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Size Images with Width and Height Attributes – image attributes width height

Most web pages use images to spice up their look. However, not all web pages use width and height to size their graphics and objects. Specifying the width and height of all embedded objects like images and applets allows your user’s browser to render your page without waiting for images to download and try on for size.

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Convert Graphic Text to Styled Text – graphic text to css text conversion

Converting graphic text to styled text is an effective way to speed optimize your website. Graphic text is simply text that has been pixed in stone in a graphic design program like Photoshop. While graphic text allows you to use any font face (see Figure 1), it has a number of disadvantages.

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Use Short Relative URLs – url abbreviation avoids long uri files and directories

Brevity is a good thing. Absolute, verbose URLs are out, relative short URLs are in. By carefully naming your files and directories, and judicious use of abbreviation with mod_rewrite and content negotiation with same, you can speed up your pages while maintaining legibility and search engine positioning.

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