Creating high performance sites
It is a common aim to make your sites faster and leaner and Nate Koetchley from Yahoo! did an exemplar job of providing the grind and grunt of what people have to do to help make their sites leaner and meaner. Check out his slides from the presentation he gave last year. They are highly relevant and at the end of the day a great basis to be working against.   http://nate.koechley.com/blog/2007/06/12/high-performance-web-sites/.
One thing that really gets on my nerves is sites that dont load quick or a poorly put together. I am as lazy as the next man or woman sometimes, but at the end of the day ther ei snothign worse than providing a product that really doesnt stack up when it comes to delivery.
A recent project I did work on was a blatant example of an old style of thinking still being promoted. When asked why we dont cut the calls to servers and reduce the general overhead of the product, I was told that we had unlimited bandwidth, so it wouldn’t save us any money of serving charges anyway.
Great - Yeah right.
In the end the user always pays. It doesn’t matter about the corporate fiber T1 blah blah connection that is allowing inhouse to see things super quickly. I still firmly believe if you optimise for 56K .. yes .. it still lives .. then you can only have a brilliant experience from all the cable and high speed connection users out there.
With high usage clogging local neighbourhood conenctions, and slow delivery internationally depending on the grand oceanic connectors capacity to deliver quickly and locality of hubs - there is no reason we shouldn’t always try to do our best to deliver streamlined solutions.
Remember, if you have to wait are you annoyed? For anything? Be if **Fastfood or a page to load. Inhouse is always faster, and if you have to wait for something to load off your machine locally - you can be assured that once it is up and running on a server, response times are going to be a lot slower.
SO aside from enough capacity to handle traffic, remember to stream line and  http://nate.koechley.com/blog/2007/06/12/high-performance-web-sites/ is a good place to get some great tips.
Filed under: UX & Usability on May 8th, 2008