CategoryOptimization

December 7, 2011 — The beauty of WordPress is in how easy it is to adapt for different tasks. One can extend it with just a couple of lines of code. In this post, we’ll review 10 shortcode snippets that will tweak and optimize your WordPress theme. You can add all of these code snippets to the functions.php file in your WordPress theme. Read more…

August 30, 2011 — Images have always been the heaviest component of websites. Even if high-speed Internet access gets cheaper and more widely available, websites will get heavier more quickly. If you really care about your visitors, then spend some time deciding between good-quality images that are bigger in size and poorer-quality images that download more quickly. And keep in mind that modern Web browsers have enough power to enhance images right on the user’s computer. In this article, I’ll demonstrate one possible solution. Read more…

May 18, 2011 — In this article I’ll be reviewing a few techniques that will help Web designers and UI professionals to improve their error pages in order to engage visitors and improve overall website experience. As C. S. Lewis once said, “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement”. Web designers should take this to heart. I’ll be focusing on error and maintenance pages, both from tracking as well as usability perspectives. I’ll also be providing a good number of examples on how to use analytics and defensive design in order to optimize user experience for such pages. First, let’s go over the error pages and cover the questions on how to optimize them efficiently. Read more…

July 25, 2009 — This post is a second part of the article Clever PNG Optimization Techniques that we posted last week. As a web designer you might be already familiar with the PNG image format which offers a full-featured transparency. It’s a lossless, robust, very good replacement of the elder GIF image format. As a Photoshop (or any other image editor) user you might think that there is not that many options for PNG optimization, especially for truecolor PNG’s (PNG-24 in Photoshop), which doesn’t have any. Some of you may even think that this format is “unoptimizable”. Well, in this post we’ll try to debunk this myth. This post describes some techniques that may help you optimize your PNG-images. These techniques are derived from laborious hours spent on studying how exactly the PNG encoder saves data. We’ll talk about grayscale, how to use fewer colors for optimization and also about reducing detail to minmize the file size. You may want to take a look at the following related articles: * Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques * Clever PNG Optimization Techniques Read more…

July 19, 2009 — A lot of traffic between users and your site comes from the static content you’re using to set up the user interface, namely layout graphics, Stylesheets and Javascript files. Read more…

July 15, 2009 — This post describes some techniques that may help you optimize your PNG-images. These techniques are derived from laborious hours spent on studying how exactly the PNG encoder saves data. We’ll start with some essentials about the PNG format and will then move to advanced optimization techniques. Read more…

July 1, 2009 — When people talk about image optimization, they consider only the limited parameters offered by popular image editors, like the “Quality” slider, the number of colors in the palette, dithering and so on. Also, a few utilities, such as OptiPNG and jpegtran, manage to squeeze extra bytes out of image files. All of these are pretty well-known tools that provide Web developers and designers with straightforward techniques of image optimization. Read more…

May 15, 2009 — In eCommerce usability improvements usually have a huge impact on conversion rates. However, usability doesn’t only mean better visual guide or better site hierarchy. It also means a better communication with potential customers using a professional, trustworthy design, delivering the right information at the right time and communicating with users instead of throwing ad-slogans at them. Read more…

October 2, 2008 — Whether you’re a Web developer, Web designer or blogger, you’ve probably had to deal with the headache of converting many images to different sizes and formats. It’s not much fun if you have to convert all of them by hand. Batch image processing can reduce this process from hours of work to just a few simple clicks. Read more…

August 18, 2008 — Some of you may remember the days when 30KB was the recommended maximum size of a web page, a value which included HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images. I find with every new project with even the slightest bit of complexity, it’s not long before that 30 KB ideal is well out of my reach. With the popularity of CSS layouts and JavaScript-enriched web page experiences, it’s not uncommon, particularly for large sites, for the CSS files alone to jump well beyond that 30KB ceiling. Read more…