RE: OT: Web site speed

["Graham Howe" <graham@xxxxxxx>]

I am not suggesting that you shouldn't do everything you can to increase
speed, but it has to be accepted that 'Joe B&Q Punter', even if
disappointed
with your site's speed, is only going to pick a competitor if they have a
faster loading site.

One other point, of course the majority of the site will be very much
database driven, as are almost all e-commerce sites now, but that does not
mean that a large amount of backend processing is required for the front
page.

Taking a hypothetical example, lets say that items flagged as being on
'special offer' should be on the home page. It would be possible to trawl
through every single product to find those on offer, or those on offer
could
be copied to a temporary table for rapid retrieval. Obviously database
experts will need to look at how best to optimise this side of it. Also it
might be worth looking at how the page is constructed on the server before
being presented to the browser, there may be some inefficiency in the
actual
constructing code.

One other point about the graphics, the orange tags along the top, home,
express checkout etc. Could be made up of a small icon gif and then text on
an orange background, if marketing really insist upon the 'shadow' under
the
tags then a single 'orange background with shadow' gif could be used for
every button (just stretching the width) with white text placed on top. You
have already got this on the yellow tags below, so why not repeat it.

Can't think of any more right now.

Regards

Graham

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Harrison [mailto:Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 12 October 2001 11:19
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [ukha_d] OT: Web site speed
>
>
> One thing I missed:
>
> I take your point about being faster than the competition, but in our
> view, it's not enough simply to beat the competition in this regard.
>
> If "Joe B&Q Punter" ends up feeling that "the
B&Q site's slow" because
> he's used to bbc.co.uk or altavista, then he only notices we're slow,
> not that Homebase is slower!
>
> Mark Harrison
> Head of Systems, eKingfisher
>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Graham Howe [mailto:graham@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 12 October 2001 11:08
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [ukha_d] OT: Web site speed
>
>
> If you are talking about www.diy.com then I have to say I
> thought it was
> pretty quick for a 'marketing driven'  site. I cleared out my
> cache and
> loaded the page in under 20 seconds on ISDN 64k line. A lot of the
> content that usually slows sites down (like flash, sound,
> animated gifs
> etc etc) are not present which is good, so the only real
> performance hit
> is the graphics. Most of the graphics seem to be small gifs
> with only a
> few jpgs so that is not bad.
>
> I don't believe that the marketers would allow you to strip off the
> photos, but that would certainly speed up the page a bit. There is a
> fair amount of use of gifs to represent words and of course if those
> words were instead created using style based text then it would be
> faster. But the marketers are again likely to put their foot down
> because they will want the specific fonts and those might not be
> possible to accurately reproduce on the page. The other
> problem will be
> that even the same font can be displayed at slightly
> different sizes by
> different browsers, so to force consistent appearance across
> browsers it
> is often necessary to resort to graphics. I would say that they should
> check out the competition and see how their pages load, for example
> www.homebase.co.uk is much slower as they have several photos on the
> front page, likewise the wickes site is pretty slow.
>
> In summary I'm nt so sure there is anything that can be done without
> removing a fair bit of the look of the page, but you may want
> to see if
> the marketers would be willing to lose the fancy fonts and have all
> words and numbers displayed as text (with appropriate styling) rather
> than graphics.
>
> Regards
>
> Graham
>
> P.S. if there is any code or database interaction involved in actually
> building the page on the server (looking at the source I suspect there
> is), then you might want to look for any inefficiencies there as well.
> But to be honest it loads almost immediately on a return visit, so it
> does appear that all delay is down to graphics.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Mark Harrison [mailto:Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx]
> > Sent: 12 October 2001 10:18
> > To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> > Subject: [ukha_d] OT: Web site speed
> >
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > An off-topic request to all you Web gurus.
> >
> > B&Q are concerned that there web site's home-page takes too
> > long to load
> > (it does!)
> >
> > So the question is, what would be your recommendations for making
it
> > load faster? Bearing in mind that marketers control the look ;-)
> >
> > Not sure if this should be on-group, so feel free to email me
> > direct if
> > you prefer!
> >
> > Mark Harrison
> > Head of Systems, eKingfisher
> >
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