I’ve been tweaking the website all day. Right now I’m using Yslow to optimize the site.
I got a C grade overall.
Time to use gzip and add expires headers.
This article ‘Five Ways to Speed Up Page Response Times‘ has been very helpful.
Cheers!
Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’
Aside from hobby writing, I do some freelance web design. I recently made a page with Creekside Systems for MastrolePassing.com. Mastrole Passing provides football training camps for quarterbacks and receivers based out of Florida. Take a look!
Rant
I spent the last few days working with a web template for a freelance web job. I might as well have not bothered.
There is nothing quite as frustrating as using a template, the intention being to make life easier, and spending twice as much time flogging it to death trying to get it to work than I would have if I had just coded from scratch to start with. The web designer purists out there are probably chuckling to themselves considering this a lesson learned: code it yourself, code it yourself!. To that I say phooey!
Instead, the lesson here is I need to run my templates through an extensive interview process. Dig a little into their background and life experience. Did they have a rough childhood that’s going to leave me bewildered and confused as unpredictable problems arise? Do they suffer from a lack of formal education, which forces me to go back and comment another person’s code to figure out what’s going on. Or worst of all, is their resume a novel script, the template being nothing but some fancy images that look nice, but the functionality being vapor. The lesson is I might just need to join the world of template maker’s and make some that give you some direction on how to use them.
/Rant
Another technical update:
As you can see, I’ve removed the background. The other one was a bit cluttered and distracting. I also changed the front back to black, Sylfaen. I just think it looks better. I took the background away from the footer box and centered the copyright lines. The top header also got padding change.
I tested the wordpress+Ajax plugin. Interesting, maybe worth looking at in the future, but it had some issues, so I disabled it.
The forums are still a test-bed only, but permalinks are now working. I’ve been trying out a few different styles. The current one is inove, found here. http://ericlbarnes.com/projects/inove-for-bbpress/. I like the look of it.
I think that’s about it. Forum is still a work in progress, but I’m pleased with this latest round of updates.
~Robert
