Book review of "Speed Up Your Site" by Andy King (free)
Did you know that, for the majority of users, the average site feels twice as slow as it did seven years ago? Neither did I, and it's just one of the eye-opening statistics quoted in " Speed Up your Site" by Andy King. In this review, Bruce Lawson goes through the book and examines its usefulness, and shares some of the many real-world tips from this ruthlessly practical book.
Chapter 12 Optimising Web Graphics
This is a vital chapter, as even the smallest image takes up kilobytes and kilobytes, yet the number of insufficiently optimised images on the web is enormous. Now, this chapter goes into a lot of detail; if you've ever caught yourself wondering exactly how JPEGs are compressed, this is the place to find out. Personally, I never have wondered that, but it's useful to know a bit of theory so you know what types of image compress well and which don't. This allows you to choose or photograph your source image accordingly. For JPEGS, king advises
- Avoiding hard lines and edges
- Blurring backgrounds with panning, telephoto lenses or Photoshop before
compressing
- Use a stable platform for the camera when taking the picture
- Don't use more than 72 dpi!
The chapter gives a fair few practical tips on which settings to use in pro-level tools like Photoshop, JPEG Cruncher, JPEG Wizard etc - it all depends on what you need; on small sites without many images (or where the images are small and decorative rather than central to the site) you can get away with trial and error using "Save for Web" from Photoshop. There's also useful comparison charts that look at the same image being compressed as GIF or PNG by different image editors; the same image can be as much as 1.8K bytes larger when compressed by ImageReady rather than Fireworks - that matters if you have lots of images on your site (eg, a photo gallery) and there's dial-up users expected.
Chapter 13 Minimizing Multimedia
Chapter 14 Case Study: Apple.com
Given the prevalence of multi-media across the web today, this is a very important chapter, so I'm surprised that Jason Wolf, who wrote it, doesn't have a namecheck on the cover. The book would be less valuable without his contribution. Some of the chapter exceeds its remit and becomes "multimedia 101", with suggestions of useful settings for audio compression and normalisation - and is none the worse for that; speeding up downloading of audio has always been a trade-off between filesize and sound quality, so it's important to make the sound as good as possible before squeezing it down.
There are some very useful tips for video optimisation, too, which continue the theme of getting the best quality signal into the computer before attempting the squeeze. These tips ain't rocket science, but we've seen them flouted hundreds of times. For example:
- Don't think that, because the movie will only be a small part of the user's
computer screen that you can use a cheap camera.
- Spend lots of time and care of lighting the movie; low light conditions produce very noisy signals and lack detail in shadows - which will be worsened by compression.
The only fluff in these two chapters is the section dealing with Flash optimisation. I can't believe that anyone who knows how to use Flash doesn't know that tweening is swifter on the download than animating all those in between frames by hand, and that fonts add download.
Chapter 15: Search Engine Optimisation
A useful chapter - although whether it's related to speeding up for your site is open to question, it's still very interesting to those of us in the web biz. The chapter outlines an interactive process to choose the keywords for your site, and suggests ways to make your site readable by the googlebot and other spiders:
- Don't use the ? character in the URL for dynamically generated content
- If you have pre-MX Flash content, make sure there is alt text, otherwise
your movie is invisible
- Use external JavaScript and CSS files, to ensure real content is higher up the page; search engines think the earlier a phrase appears in a file, the more important it is.
Chapter 16: Case-studies
Chapter 17: Advanced techniques: Server-Side Optimisation
Some seriously esoteric stuff here mixed in with some highly useful techniques, like using URL abbreviation to compress all your links. On a portal site (King uses Yahoo as an example) where there are many links, this can shave up to 30% of your download.
Chapter 18: Compressing the Web
The final chapter in the book deals with actually compressing the content on the server, and the browser will automatically decompress it. We use httpZip (and review it here) which is for Windows, but there's solutions for all the major servers detailed in this chapter.
I was surprised that this chapter came at the end of the book; turning on server-side compression is not easy (though it's not Einstein-level either) but, once implemented, can give you massive compression and reduced download times - so it would seem to be the solution that you'd go for first, assuming that you are running your own server. Certainly, for sites hosted on a server that you control, HTTP compression delivers the greatest bang for your buck.
Of course, not everyone does run their own server and hence therefore, not everyone has this option, but therein lies the central paradox of this book; those who run big sites who will most benefit from the highly detailed techniques that King describes, will certainly be in a position to optimise their servers and get the best compression available.
Bruce Lawson
I'm the brand manager of glasshaus, a publishing company specialising in books for web professionals. We've a series for dreamweaver professionals - the dreamweaver pro series.
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