Posts Tagged ‘web development’

Website Speed Tips For Web Designers

Since Google’s recent announcement that web page load times are now a ranking factor web designers and developers have been required to pay additional attention to site performance considerations. Here are just a handful of considerations that today’s responsible web developers need to keep in mind.

Most of todays web pages are made up of a collection of components including CSS files, javascript, images and often movies. Minimising the number of elements and therefore the number of HTTP requests necessary to render a page is crucial for fast page load times.

Around 80% of the end user’s response time is consumed in waiting for all of the page elements to download. It is well known that this waiting time can prompt visitors to leave an ecommerce site and visit a faster loading competitor. This time can be reduced by using a content delivery network to serve up the static content, such as javascript and css files. A content delivery network is simply a collection of servers setup to efficiently deliver content to end users.

As web designs become richer and more engaging to the end user they require an increasing number of components including javascript, images and maybe Flash. On a first visit a number of HTTP requests are made in order to download these elements. If these are cached then there is less to download on a subsequent visit and this can be controlled using the ‘Expires’ header. This is commonly used for images but can be effectively used for all components including Flash and stylesheets.

Compression is another technique that every web developer should be using. GZIP is one of the most popular compression tools, supported by most browsers, it can reduce the size of many elements by as much as 70%.

There are lots of additional techniques that are both good for search engine optimisation of web pages and will also improve the user experience. For example: stylesheets should be located at the top of pages and scripts at the bottom; both javascript and CSS files should be minified; and javascript and CSS should be in external files; also, reducing the number of DNS lookups and redirects is always a good idea. Good luck.

Benefits Of Web Design Courses

Having a new career or part-time business in Web design is a real possibility nowadays. Online businesses are becoming more and more common every day. What is one thing that all of these businesses have in common? They all need websites. And a site which is well designed can really make a difference to the chances that they have to succeed. Web design training is essential to learning how to create attractive, professional and functional websites for your business or that of someone else.

Why is web design important? You need to make sure that users who are visiting your website can find the products, services or information they are looking for. You need a website which functions the way it is supposed to and that brings together different elements including text, graphics and layout. If you do not have the training in different design programs, you will not have the tools to create sites which customers want to visit again and again.

There are different ways that you can go about getting web design training. You can choose to take different individual courses in the programs which you will be using, or you can take a course which will give you a diploma in web development and design. Either choice can be excellent but it depends on how extensively you will be using your design skills.

If you think that you are interested in making a career out of web development and design you should look at taking a comprehensive course. This will give you a good background in different programming languages, it will allow you to learn the basics of design and how to make something look attractive, and will give you practical experience as you design sites during the course of your instruction.

Even if you are more interested learning to design websites for yourself and relatives there are some principals that will carry through from the commercial side of the business. You will want to make sure that your site will load well no matter what the connection speed is of the people viewing it. You will also want to make sure that people can find the information they are looking for. Web design training can help you achieve all of these things and more.

You need to know that computer programs are changing and being updated regularly and you need to follow the changes to be able to use technology properly. This can mean getting used to new operating systems which are being developed, new versions of standard programs that will allow you to use new features, and trends and patterns in web design as well.

Web design training does not have to be a big deal. It is simple and fun to learn and can be a great way to turn a hobby into a viable and thriving business.

Need to master Website design techniques? We offer Web design training courses in London and all over the UK.