[scaz182]

Hi people,

I'm in my third year studying BSc Computer Science and need web developers/designers to take part in a questionnaire about Website Optimisation (the process of improving download times) and various tools available to help with it.

Although it may be a bit of a push I hope to get ~100 people to take part! I would be forever in your debt if you could take ~5-10 minutes of your time to help me out with this.

Also it would be amazing if you are familiar with any of these tools: Yahoo!'s YSlow, Website Optimization's Web Page Analyzer, iWebTools Speed Test or Website Pulse's Web Page Speed test or any similar tools!

LINK >> Questionnaire! << LINK

Cheers

Rich.

[edit- it appears iWebtools speed checker is down as of current, if you have used it before then fine otherwise just leave that section]

[BlueDreamer]

The questionnaire seems biased to the tools you mention, and since I've never used any of them I didn't complete it.

Optimising a site isn't rocket science...

1. Optimise images for the best quality vs file size
2. Streamline HTML and CSS (if you write sematically this is pretty automatic)
3. Avoid large multimedia files like Flash movies unless they are essential to the context of the page
4. Avoid multiple calls to external files - why have 3 CSS files when you can use one!
5. Avoid external scripts and ad banners - these take time to be pulled into the page
6. Keep pages around 3 screens depth maximum - the more data on the page the slower it will load - some blogs are terrible in this respect
7. If you use a database make sure the database tables are optimised
8. Host in the same country as your main audience for faster server response times - it might only be a small difference but a second is a long time on the web!
9. Don't use hosts that oversell, overcrowded servers often mean slower response times
10. Don't use tables for layout - an old chestnut but these do slow page rendering times

[scaz182]

Perhaps not rocket science but I feel some may argue it being a science.

May I ask which parts you feel are biased towards the tools I mention?

Whilst yes, you have listed a number of concepts it is worth noting that these tools are not designed to optimise your site but to help IDENTIFY areas of a site that are detrimental to its response time.

At no point do I feel these tools do a good job, this is the purpose of the questionnaire, to find out other users opinions on them!

[scaz182]

Hope its ok to bump this up, still need more participants!

It only takes five mins to complete!

Cheers.

[BlueDreamer]

scaz182, on Jan 4 2009, 14:57, said:

May I ask which parts you feel are biased towards the tools I mention?

Most of the questions revolved around experience of the apps you mentioned so they are effectively "biased" to those products - terminology!

I have to adminit i hadn't heard of most of them!

[scaz182]

Yeah, I was a little worried about people having not used them before, I was hoping people would be interested in trying them out for the purpose of this questionnaire but unfortunately it doesn't seem that way.

I'm still unsure what you mean by "biased" towards the apps though, the questionnaire is designed to get peoples opinions on those specific apps and it does also enquire whether any other similar apps or tools have been used before.