Websites are not DIY anymore
Can I Build My Own Website? Seems Easy Enough.
Website design has grown to new heights. It’s not only the appealing look and intuitive navigation, but also the content that goes on a page. There are so many attributes associated with it that I can write a book about it. Here are the few things to consider while designing a page.
Skill Level - 1 (Generally Tech Proficient):
- Follow the SEO rules by moz before starting anything
- Don’t overload the page with super high resolution images that takes lot of time to download. When is the last time you waited more than 5 seconds for a website to load?
- Make sure the content is clear and don’t embed the content in pictures
- A user likes to interact with website once it loads. So, it is a good idea to place your phone number / Contact form links above the fold (definition: the viewable area when the website opens up).
- Try not to use page blocking pop ups.
- Absolutely NO FLASH players. Never.
Skill Level - 2 (Tech Savvy & Interested):
- Combine photos with CSS sprite sheet technique
- Resize the photos to a max size of 1600 x 900.
- Place Javascripts in footer or after the <body> tag
- Make a habit of using JPEG images instead of PNG. The difference between JPEG and PNG is , the latter uses additional channel "Alpha" (Transparency). This is good for logos but for full color images, stay away from it.
Skill Level - 3 (Tech Passionate):
- Enable gzip compression.
- Use NGINX server.
- (For NGINX) Hide the server info, take care of XSS attack, click jacking and cross site scripting. Just copy and paste the following lines in nginx.conf. Typically, the file is found at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
server_tokens off; add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN; add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff; add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
Say goodbye to PHP and welcome to NodeJS ( In my opinion... ) Static sites built on NodeJS are insanely fast and can save hundreds of dollars in server costs. Don't take my word for it, watch it for here and decide yourself
Still not convinced?
We designed a website for one of our clients Haynes Construction which has high quality images all around and loads instantaneously. If you are thinking that the website is on an insane server, you would be wrong !
Call us at 800-325-4315 to find out more or if you are interested to get something similar. We are more than happy to give you some tips if you are already working with any other company
(For WordPress Users) Offload the MySQL database to a standalone server. Offload images & any other static content to CDNs like Cloudflare.
- Cache, Cache, Cache....
- Minimize Web-Requests.
- Minimize in-line CSS scripts.
Too much to handle ? I was just getting warmed up....
As I mentioned before there is a ton that can be done on a website and if your business is based on the website, don't do the mistake of doing it yourself unless you know what you are doing.
Feel free to contact us
