> 8) What factors determine your recommended maximum home page size (in > kilobytes)? How are the factors related?
My answer: The number of kilobytes is irrelevant to the user. Page load time is what matters. To improve the page load time, the following items are a good idea: 1) Minimize the number of TCP connections -- make sure keep alive is turned on 2) Minimize Number of HTTP requests required -- use css sprites, consolidate scripts/css. 3) Make sure the page progressively renders. -- if you get a white flash in IE, you are doing something wrong 4) Remove unnecessary blocking javascript -- e.g. analytics code should be defered, ads should be placed at the end of the page and positioned with css if possible. 5) Use expires http headers. 6) Gzip all js/css/html. 7) Use subdomains to get around the 2 connection limit. 8) Replace complicated float layouts with tables -- standards freaks hate this, but Google uses tables all the time because they care more about page render time than standards conformance. 9) Optimize all images for the web. -- use the "save for web" feature in photoshop. It strips out all the unnecessary metadata and optimizes the palette. Page size is rarely the issue. -John C. _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
