DT Blog Web Design Tips, Tutorials & More!

Response time to web clicks is a highly important part of your optimization of your web pages. Slow loading of pages looses you more customers than you realize. By using too heavy a load to open your index/ initial web pages is one of the biggest mistakes you can make on the internet. At the time when I first started dabbling in web design, that was on of the first things that were drummed into my head. If your site doesn’t open in 30 seconds you have lost the person. People on the internet are not much different to the ones in your real life. Most tend to want instant gratification and impatience is a part and parcel of modern life.

Luckily there are several tools to help you speed your site up.

YSlow And Firebug

This is a tool from Yahoo, which works in conjunction with Firebug.  You will need to download Firebug as well as Yslow.  Y slow is actually an add on to Firefox, but it tests your pages and gives you a summary of their performance by using Smush.it and JS lint.

They return a report which is a grade report with the best marks being A. Quite often by cleaning up your code you can reduce the number of requests for a page and increase the speed of loading.

Fiddler

This is a program that is free and based on the net, although there is a download. What this does is check the traffic from Http web based traffic, and you can use it to debug your pages.

Cuzillion

Test your pages and read the FAQ pages. With this tool, you should be able to check your load times with different types of code and search engines. There is a tool here to construct pages and check their behaviors in the various browsers.

Monitor

There are three tools in one.  You can monitor your website and know when it goes down for any reason.  If you run a web server you can use it to monitor the server and check for any problems prior to them causing the server to go down. The third one monitors to prevent attacks on your website.

IBM Page Detailer

This tool clearly shows you how and where there might be a blockage on your site by determining the size, and loading times by timing each page load and enabling you to improve loading by reducing the size of the load. Just open the page while having the detailer open and click on any part you want to check.

PushtoTest has upgraded to Test maker.

Test maker is the latest in the line of testing tools on the internet. It is a free download to test your web pages and is apparently aimed towards the new cloud computing. It is combining with Glassbox to monitor Java problems, and they have been having a series of on line tutorial seminars on the subject. Both are the open source and it is extremely interesting the way they are tackling the next stream in the line of the internet.

There is always something new to learn on the internet. That is what makes it so interesting.