Tim
Life is good Joined: Nov 2007
Location: Kalamazoo

I've been doing a lot of research and found that my page rank is not very good, thought getting better. So I'm working on fixing this with non-obvious changes. Like, initial page load times, what the actual "home" page is, limiting my entry points and adjusting what's "above the fold".

Currently you can go to a number of different URL's to get to this site. Like:
   1: http://gettinlucky.dyndns.org
   2: http://gettinlucky.us
   3: http://timmeers.net
   3: http://www.timmeers.net

There is also two different ways for each one of those too!! 
   1: http://gettinlucky.dyndns.org/defualt.aspx
   2: http://gettinlucky.us/defualt.aspx
   3: http://timmeers.net/defualt.aspx
   3: http://www.timmeers.net/defualt.aspx

So in all I have 8 different "home" pages. Hell there might even be more than that! But these are the 8 primary entry points, I will look for more as I go. By doing this it will limit some people, but I will be doing it the right way, issuing a 301 redirect to the "correct" page. This will help notify the non-oblivious user that the page has changed without notifying them. They just have to notice the different URL in the browser.

The next step is to reduce the initial page load. According to Firebug in Firefox my initial load is 343KB, and that's NOT counting any images. Go ahead and add another 45KB worth of image on top of that. Of course the overall load time is still fairly small, only 4.37 seconds, there is a LOT of room for improvements. I've already started on MAJOR improvement and that was moving some of the images to another domain. This allowed the main content to load and process and left the image processing and downloading to another thread on the server and render after the main content was loaded. This dropped the load time down nearly a second for the initial load. And in today's instant gratification society a second is a LONG time.

Of course the initial load of a blog post is substantially longer and heavier. The initial load is at least 398KB and around 450KB or greater with the images factored in. This has a load time of nearly 5 seconds. This is for a few reasons, one there is different content, two there are more menu options, and three you have to download additional CSS for some of the site features. However on a second load of the page there is 346KB loaded from browser cache. And it takes only 2.7 seconds to fully render.

Not that I want to compair it to such an awesome site, but StackOverflow loads in under 2 seconds, and weighs in at under 200KB. Of course that site has at least a 10MB connection, which is 10 times faster than mine. But for $30 a month the 1MB does good enough. They also serve very few images. and what they do serve for images are from external sources.

Another improvement is adjusting what is above the fold, meaning what you see when you first load the page with out scrolling down. There are tricks that can be done for this to actually not load the content that is below the fold. But that also has increased overhead. The main reason to update what is above the fold is to tell the visitor a little about the site, or maybe a little about the users or the site. I've already done part of this by adding the mini profile view to the top of galleries and blog posts. But I'm plannign to do more with rearranging the side bar for the main page and adding editable content for the top of the main page.

The last item on the agenda is to limit the number of scripts that have to load and download. To do this I'll be replacing the lovely rounded corners I'm using with a jQuery based solution. By my initial review it lowers the initial load over 100KB and should take at least a second off the load time.

Stay tuned for faster pages and a few other small items while I work on larger things, like videos!