I’ve been trying to hunt down some research and credible resources that deal specifically with web design for women. I’m finding surprisingly little coverage on the topic. One of the few studies that I find referenced time and time again is the University of Glamorgan study conducted in 2005. A few key points from the findings:

» Continue reading “What Women Want: Designing Websites for Women”

These are the top five things that have made by blogging experience richer/better/easier in 2006. I recommend you try these out (if you haven’t already) in 2007.

» Continue reading “Top 5 Must-Have Add-Ons for Your Blog in 2007″

The evolution of a modern web designer. The 12 steps:
» Continue reading “Have You Reached CSS Zen Yet?”

With all the widgets popping up from different websites that allow you to add photos, videos, bookmarks, and tools to your blog, it’s becoming easier and easier to bloat your pages to the point where they start to fall under their own weight.

This was recently illustrated by the case of A VC Blog, where Fred’s site got so bad, it warranted its own “wow, my blog is slow” post. Fred from Webreakstuff gave him the lowdown about what was actually causing the unbearably slow page loads.

With broadband penetration being as high as it is, it’s easy to start ignoring the size of your pages. If you ever hope to be Dugg, you HAVE to mind your load speeds. It’s a lesson we learned the hard way with this blog earlier this month. If you don’t want your first time visitors clicking the “back” button once they get to your blog and want people to actually like coming back and reading your posts, you have to mind your load speeds.

Ask yourself “is this plugin/widget/script adding something useful to my blog or am I really the only one who cares to see my cat’s flickr stream on my business blog?” and “how much does it slow down my site?” It might be time to trim at least a few of them - or maybe move them to their own pages and replace them with a link.

Use the Speed Analysis Tool and check out the stats on your blog. The tool is not perfect (and frankly a little outdated) so don’t take it as gospel but it’s a pretty good starting point. (This blog takes 17 requests and 38k to load. Not too bad.) The “Analysis and Recommendations” at the bottom is really strict in my opinion. It tells you that your site should be 30K or less and your external scripts should be 8K or less. I’m going to guess that if you went by these “Kilobyte Nazi” standards, your site would look and function a little like this. I mean, even Eric Meyer’s website gets a caution.

Audit your blog once in a while.

TechCrunch reported on the launch of Media Temple’s new hosting service called Grid Server this morning. It promises to be a new kind of hosting platform that’s priced more like shared hosting ($20/month), but is instantly scalable on demand (more like Amazon’s EC3 computing service).

For $20/month you get 100 GB is storage and 1TB of bandwdth. If you have overages, they charge you incrementally. You can host up to a 100 sites and there’s an option for Ruby on Rails (but only 1 app per account it seems).

I’ve decided to give the Grid Server a spin with one of our projects. Signup was fairly easy, as was setup. I started with a 1-click install of a Wordpress installation and have played around a little bit since then. The control panel is quite intuitive. The site speed seems to be much faster than Dreamhost’s, but that might just be because it’s still a new service and they haven’t been stressed.

I’ll report my experiences after a few weeks/months after we test out the Grid-Server, its capabilities, speed, etc. It’s still too early to tell if the Media Temple Grid $20/mo. service will trump my Dreamhost Shared $8/mo. service (when it comes to real-world usage), but it really does look promising.