10 Tips on designing a fast loading web site

Tips and tricks on effective web design

The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load. Try out our tips to build a great looking web site that also loads fast.

1. Minimize the use of images - The key to a fast loading web site is to minimize the use of images. Images do enhance a page but don’t make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Notice the popular sites like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.
2. Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image. You can also use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images or to get a recommendation on how to cut down the size of an image.
3. Use Tables creatively - You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like. Check out our homepage and our menus to see how we have used tables in our site.
   Read more on Using HTML Tables Creatively
4. Cut down the use of animated gifs - Don’t use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor’s attention to a particular section of your site.
5. Design simple icons - Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor. We have used small icons in our homepage to highlight the main sections of our site.
6. Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this : <tr background=”/images/header_backgroud.gif” width=”100%”>
7. Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.
   Rollover the text on the right menu to see how we have used CSS Styles to get a simple but nice text effect.
   Check out our CSS Styles tutorial for more cool tips on CSS Styles
8. Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don’t make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.
9. Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.
10. Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful. We kept using it to improve our site till we got a report that said good loading time!

We learnt these tips while building our web site. We’ve enjoyed sharing them with you and hope that you found them useful.

Kaynak : entheosweb.com

Yapılan herşey(imiz) artık web 2.0 üzerine, web siteleri, uygulamalar artık internet kabuk değiştiriyor ve netwebapp sitesinde yukarıdaki resimde de görüldüğü üzere bir çok konu başlığını içeren web 2.0 uygulamaları ve siteleri bulunuyor. işinize yarar birşeyler mutlaka çıkacaktır.

• CSS Tips and Tricks by Roger Johansson
• (The Only) Ten Things To Know About CSS by John Manoogian
• CSS Crib Sheet by Dave Shea
• My Top Ten CSS Tricks [CSS Tutorials] by Trenton Moss
• CSS Tips by Philipp Lenssen
• Top CSS Tips by Jonathan Snook
• Ten CSS tricks — corrected and improved by Tantek Çelik
• Ten More CSS Trick you may now know by Trenton Moss
• CSS techniques I use all the time by Christian Montoya
• CSS Tip Flags by Douglas Bowman
• My 5 CSS Tips by Mike Rundle
• 5 Steps to CSS Heaven by Ping Mag
• Handy CSS by Lachlan Hunt
• Erratic Wisdom: 5 Tips for Organizing Your CSS by Thame Fadial
• 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should) by SeoMoz
• 10 CSS Tips You Might Not Have Known About by Christopher Scott
• A List Apart: Articles: 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards by Ben Henick
• Tips for a better design review process by D. Keith Robinson
• 20 pro tips - .net magazine by Jason Arber
• CSS Best Practices by Richard K Miller
• 10 Quick Tips for an Easier CSS Life by Paul Ob
• 10 CSS Tips from a Professional CSS Front-End Architect by 72 DPI in the shade team blog
• Web Design References: Cascading Style Sheets by Laura Carlson
• Getting Into Good Coding Habits by Adrian Senior

Kaynak: Smashingmagazine

• Play, experiment with CSS. “Play. Play with background images. Play with floats.” [Play with positive and negative margins. Play with inheritance and cascading rules. Play. [Chric Casciano]
• Learn from others. Learn from great sites built by others. Any site’s HTML is easily accessible by viewing a page’s source code. See how others have done things and apply their methods to your own work.
  [20 pro tips]

Kaynak: Smashingmagazine

• You can force IE to apply transparence to PNGs. “In theory, PNG files do support varied levels of transparency; however, an Internet Explorer 6 bug prevents this from working cross-browser.” [CSS Tips, Outer-Court.com]

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• You can specify body tag ID. “In most cases placing an ID in the body tag will allow you manipulate CSS presentational items and markup elements by page by page basis. Not only will you be able to organize your sections you will be able to create multiple CSS presentations without changing your markup from template to template or page to page.” [Ryan Parr, Invasion of Body Switchers]

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• Be careful when styling links if you’re using anchors. “If you use a classic anchor in your code (<a name="anchor">) you’ll notice it picks up :hover and :active pseudo-classes. To avoid this, you’ll need to either use id for anchors instead, or style with a slightly more arcane syntax: :link:hover, :link:active” [Dave Shea]
• Define relationships for links. “The rel attribute is supposed to indicate a semantic link relationship from one resource to another.

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Roger Johansson has written an extremely useful series of articles about CSS 2.1 Selectors. These articles are highly recommended to read - some useful aspects can be found in the list below. Note that selectors ‘>’ and ‘+’ aren’t supported in IE6 and earlier versions of Internet Explorer (updated). Devamını Okuyun »

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• Add borders to identify containers. “Use plenty of test styles like extra borders or background colors when building your documents or debugging layout issues. div { border:1px red dashed; } works like a charm. There are also bookmarklets that apply borders and do other things for you.” You can also use * { border: 1px solid #ff0000; }. [Chric Casciano]. Adding a border to specific elements can help identify overlap and extra white space that might not otherwise be obvious. [CSS Crib Sheet]

1. * { border: 1px solid #f00; }

• Check for closed elements first when debugging. “If you ever get frustrated because it seemed like you changed one minor thing, only to have your beautiful holy-grail layout break, it might be because of an unclosed element. [10 CSS Tips]

Kaynak: Smashingmagazine

• To work with EMs like with pxs, set font-size on the body-tag with 62.5%. Default-value of the font-size is 16px; applying the rule, you’ll get one Em standing for roughly ten pixels (16 x 62.5% = 10). “I tend to put a font-size on the body tag with value: 62.5%. This allows you to use EMs to specify sizes while thinking in PX terms, e.g. 1.3em is approximately 1.3px. ” [Jonathan Snook]

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• Shorten hexadecimal colour notation. “In CSS, when you use hexadecimal colour notation and a colour is made up of three pairs of hexadecimal digits, you can write it in a more efficient way by omitting every second digit: #000 is the same as #000000, #369 is the same as #336699 [Roger Johansson]

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• Keep containers to a minimum. “Save your document from structural bloat. New developers will use many div’s similar to table cells to achieve layout. Take advantage of the many structural elements to achieve layout. Do not add more div’s. Consider all options before adding additional wrappers (div’s) to achieve an effect when using a little nifty CSS can get you that same desired effect.” [Ryan Parr]

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• Organize your CSS-styles, using master style sheets. “Organizing your CSS helps with future maintainability of the site. Start with a master style sheet. Within this style sheet import your reset.css, global.css, flash.css (if needed) and structure.css and on occasion a typography style sheet. Here is an example of a “master” style sheet and how it is embedded in the document:”

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• After you have a design, start with a blank page of content. “Include your headers, your navigation, a sample of the content, and your footer. Then start adding your html markup. Then start adding your CSS. It works out much better.” [CSSing]
• Reset your CSS-styles first. “You can often eliminate the need to specify a value for a property by taking advantage of that property’s default value. Some people like doing a Global white space reset by zeroing both margin and padding for all elements at the top of their stylesheets. Eric Meyer’s Global Reset, Christian Montoya’s initial CSS file, Mike Rundle’s initial CSS file, Ping Mag’s initial CSS file. [Roger Johansson]

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Kaynak:Smashingmagazine

Kaynak:Smashingmagazine

Kaynak:Smashingmagazine

Kaynak:Smashingmagazine