Comments on: 4 Seconds… Your Website Has to Respond Quickly

By: Joseph Thornley

Joseph Thornley — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 14:15:11 +0000

Good post Steve,
You mention the importance of SEO. What are your thoughts on this? Do you build measurable objectives into the plan for each new site you design? And then do you start measuring against a baseline so that you can track actual performance against those objectives? What kind of reports do clients get?
Maybe you could do a post on these questions?

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 14:11:28 +0000

You’re bang on Joe. With us, it’s often a bit of tug-of-war between the designers and the developers to strip out the “superfluous” design elements (obviously a designer’s definition of superfluous differs slightly from a developer’s… hence the tug-of-war) but it always challenges the designers to defend their designs, which is a good thing. Sure I’d love to have to have all the text in a particular typeface and weight, but is it really that important at the end of the day that the menu items be in Myriad Pro Semibold vs. Verdana? Not usually.

Which reminds me… something I should have mentioned in the original post was sIFR – a fantastic technique that gives designers the ability to almost embed specific fonts in a site. It’s a brilliant mix of javascript, CSS and Flash and degrades gracefully. Can’t ask for much more than that!

By: Joe Rancourt

Joe Rancourt — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 13:08:59 +0000

Great reminder Steve! Even with broadband capacity and penetration gently increasing in Canada, there is still no reason to overtax the system or the user with heavy graphics that don’t really add any bang for the buck.

These days, virtually anyone can slap a site together, but creating strong design using quick loading graphics is still a finesse job that requires some planning and thought. Keeping it simple and using the content to drive the interest is still, and will forever be, the key.

From a design perspective, you have to ask if the heavy graphics significantly add to the experience or are they just glitz that may in fact have an adverse effect.

Again, great reminder…