Design Fast Websites

NICOLE SULLIVAN Design Fast Websites don’t blame the rounded corners!

Exceptional Performance at Yahoo!

Quantify and improve the performance of all Yahoo! products worldwide

Y! Performance Research Engineering Team Nicole Sullivan, Anande Kishore (intern), Stoyan Stefanov, Philip Tellis, Swapnil Shinde

Make your users happy • Users care if sites are fast. • I can’t give you the solution • I can help you understand the problem.

Why talk about performance?

1: Because fast is better

2: Because sites are bigger

Modern web sites & applications have changed architecturally.

From 2003 to 2008: 97K to 312K. 25.7 to 49.9 objects.

In past 12 months, Top 1000 sites: From 250K to 310.4K. WebSiteOptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page

3: Time is money

+100 ms

Amazon:1% drop in sales +100 ms

+400 ms

Yahoo!: 5-9% drop in full-page trafﬁc +400 ms

+500 ms

Google: 20% fewer searches +500 ms

Users care about performance!

Performance Fruit (some low, some high)

Web Dev Philosophy • Work out of respect for the design. • Designers make our code as beautiful and clever on the outside as it is on the inside. • Respect the original design vision. consistent design = clean code = fast site.

9 Best Practices 1. Create a component 5. Avoid non-standard library of smart objects browser fonts. 2. Use consistent semantic 6. Use columns rather than styles rows. 3. Design modules to be 7. Choose your bling transparent on the carefully. inside. 8. Be ﬂexible. 4. Optimize images and sprites. 9. Learn to love grids.

1 Create a component library of smart objects

Components are like legos Mix and match to create diverse and interesting pages.

Site-wide legos: • Headings • Lists (e.g. action list, external link list, product list, or feature list) • Module headers and footers • Grids • Buttons • Anything else that should be consistent site-wide.

Reusing elements makes them performance “freebies”

Legos ﬁrst Design individual pages only once all the legos have been deﬁned.

Avoid redundancy

Nearly identical modules Headings 3 and 5 are too similar.

Rule of thumb: If two modules look too similar to include on the same page, they are too similar to include together in a site, choose one!

2 Use consistent semantic styles

A Heading should not become a Heading in another part of the page.

Consistent site-wide

Consistency Writing more rules to overwrite the crazy rules from before. e.g. Heading should behave predictably in any module.

How about an example? Personal ﬁnance

3 Design modules to be transparent on the inside.

Contour blocks Background blocks Content Objects - headings, paragraphs, lists, headers, footers, buttons, etc. Capital of the Canterbury region and the largest city on the South Island (population just over 300,000) exudes a palpable air of gentility and a connectedness with the mother country. Read more... X X 1:n

Making it look fab Requires careful choice of pixels. Bonus: Consider PNG8 for progressive enhancement http://alistapart.com/articles/mountaintop/

Pitfalls Variable or gradient backgrounds.

4 Optimize images and sprites

Optimize sprites 1. How many pages does your property have? 2. Is your site modular? (hint: it should be!) 3. How much time can your team spend on site maintenance?

9 Image Optimizations 1. Combine like colors 6. Reduce anti-aliased pixels - via size and alignment 2. Avoid whitespace 7. Avoid diagonal gradients 3. Horizontal better than vertical 8. Avoid alpha transparency 4. Limit colors 9. Change gradient color every 2-3 pixels 5. Optimize individual images, then sprite

Careful with Logos Very recognizable so small changes will be noticed more easily.

Try progressively enhanced PNG8

Avoid ﬁlters Why is the AlphaImageLoader used? IE6 and earlier don’t natively support alpha transparency. This ﬁlter forces that support.

Problem with ﬁlters • Blocks rendering, freezes the browser • Increased memory consumption • Per element, not per image!

Solution: Avoid AlphaImageLoader 1. BEST: avoid completely, use PNG8 which degrades gracefully in IE < 7 2. Fallback: use underscore hack so the ﬁlter is applied only to IE < 7 #elem { background: url(some.png); _background: none; _filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader (src='some.png', sizingMethod='crop'); }

Progressively enhanced PNG8 Build a binary transparency image. In Fireworks, add a few alpha transparent pixels.

IE6 Firefox Opera IE7+ Safari Good browsers get more And the dinosaurs get an acceptable fallback

Experimental Data Removing Alpha Image Loader 100ms Yahoo! search

Crush images Step 1: Quality, Designer chooses quality (e.g. via save for the web) Step 2: Non-lossy compression to squeak the last bytes out of the image.

demo http://smushit.com

5 Avoid non-standard browser fonts.

6 Use columns rather than rows.

7 Choose your bling carefully. Consider your market and users.

8 Be ﬂexible. Extensible height and width.

• Grids control width • Content controls height

9 Learn to love grids.

Flickr Photo Credits: • idigit_teddy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/design_inspiration/238542495/ • lucianvenutian: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucianvenutian/1142630637/ • Gimli_36: http://www.flickr.com/photos/navillot/1878124531/ • NathanFromDeVryEET: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ thatguyfromcchs08/2300190277/ • Stabilo Boss: http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss/101793494/in/ set-72057594060779001/

Thanks! Nate Koechley - YUI. High Performance Websites: ✴ http://www.slideshare.net/natekoechley/high-performance-web-sites-2008 Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Team: ✴ http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/ A list apart: ✴ http://alistapart.com/articles/mountaintop/ Tom Chi - Yahoo! Search

Let’s keep talking... http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/ http://stubbornella.org nicole@stubbornella.org “stubbornella” on the web... twitter, dopplr, everywhere...

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Design Fast Websites

by Nicole Sullivan

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