Re: OT: Web site speed

["keith marlow" <keithmarlow_97@xxxxxxx>]

--- In ukha_d@y..., "Mark Harrison" <Mark.Harrison@e...>
wrote:
> Graham
>
> Thanks for this. The brand-marketing is the utter lead here, hence
the
> insistence on exactly the right "corporate" fonts which, as
you say,
> effectively means graphics.
>
> As you suspected, there's a _lot_ of back-end integration on this
site -
> I don't see how we could run a site with 80,000 different items on
it
> without ;-)


Hi graham,

I have used the B&Q site on several occasions - speed seems to have
never been an issue - although it can prove a chore sometimes to find
what you are looking for.

If you really want to speed things up 'compressing' the CGI values
and variable names would make massive savings across the site from
what I can see. You can also do tricks with improving the 'density'
of the html to gain further speed advantages.

If you do the above - the site should wizz.

the other big win from speeding up sites for users using such tricks
is that your users per Mb bandwidth ratio improves - so you lower
your rate of increase in the cost base - means more profit for
someone..

Concerning backend integration - I have a story that might prompt
you to check that the backend database is indeed completely in sync
with the frontend interface....

My wife and I recently moved into a house which needed all the 60's
style doors replacing with a consistant colonial styling - we found
on the site that prepainted white doors were available at 29.99 -
bargain, with no need to paint too boot. So I ordered 10 of these;
when they turned up they were actually primed white doors, not
prepainted (i.e. finished) white doors - so we sent them back and
asked B&Q to send us the right doors.  Same wrong doors came again..
By this time we had given up on B&Q and got the local homebase to
send us the primed doors and I'll paint them at a later stage..

Throughout this ordeal - it appeared that what was on the web site
didn't tally directly with what B&Q staff thought was spec'ed.. they
said they would raise this with the IT staff to see what happenned..
I know this could be a whole range of possible problem sources, from
duff data file to hung-over staff member doing stock control and
assignment..  be interesting to see what the core problem was.

On a completely different topic, I have a comfort system, and I'd
like to do something 'special' for christmas... I have an 18" 'hip
hop' dancing santa I'm thinking of inflicting on anybody who strays
into the front garden PIR range.. but I was wondering what people
have done with lights/etc?

thanks

Keith
>
> Your point about "reloading fast on return" is excellent!!!
>
> Mark Harrison
> Head of Systems, eKingfisher
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Graham Howe [mailto:graham@xxxxxxx...]
> Sent: 12 October 2001 11:08
> To: ukha_d@y...
> 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@y...
> > 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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