Recent posts now migrated

I have completed the migration of these posts to my new blog, located at webperformancematters.com:

Understanding Web Usability

One of the great things about the Web has always been its democratic nature. Anyone can participate. But once you do, your contributions are wide open to public scrutiny. Good or bad, someone will evaluate your Web content.

Tags: Usability, Web design, Worst website, Ryan Stewart, Rich Internet Application, RIA, performance.

See the new site, here.


Web Design and Mouse Rage Syndrome
Have you ever been frustrated at a Web site that downloads with the speed of an Alaskan glacier? Or become angry when a favorite site, or your Internet connection, is down. Have you experienced any of these symptoms:

• Faster heart rate?
  
• Increased sweating?
  
• Furious clicking of the mouse?
  
• Simultaneous clicking and cursing the screen?
  
• Bashing the mouse?

Come on now -- admit it! Maybe some of them, just once or twice? Because if any of this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
Tags: Social Issues Research Centre, SIRC, YouGov, mouse rage, Web design, performance, Web performance management, health.

See the new site, here.

Yahoo! on Web Page Performance

A recent post by Tenni Theurer, who works in a performance team at Yahoo!, appeared in the Yahoo! User Interface Blog. The post begins with the claim that ...

... most of web page performance is affected by front-end engineering, that is, the user interface design and development.

Theurer introduces the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. In the case of Web page download time, she argues that the backend systems which generate an HTML document -- apache, C++, databases, etc. -- should be regarded as the 80% of causes that account for only 20% of download time. The other 80% of download time is spent fetching the elements that make up the page, such as images, scripts, and stylesheets.

Tags: Yahoo, Pareto principle, 80/20 Rule, performance, Web performance management, IBM Page Detailer,Keynote, page size, round trip time, RTT, TCP, slow start.

See the new site, here.

ITIL Crash Course

Anyone involved with IT these days knows that ITIL is a hot topic, and one that seems to get hotter every month. ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, has evolved from work sponsored by the UK Government in the late 1980's. According to the official ITIL site, it is "the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world".

Tags: ITIL, InfoWorld, ISO 20000, performance, Web performance management, service level management, SLM.

See the new site, here.

101 Essential Checklists

Continuing my series of posts on Web performance guidelines, today I'm reviewing one chapter of a new book, Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists, by Shirley Kaiser of SKDesigns, published by Sitepoint in July 2006.

Tags: Shirley Kaiser, SKDesigns, Sitepoint, performance, Web site optimization, Checklist, page design, site design, service level, SLM, optimization, Web optimization, tuning, Web tuning.

See the new site, here.

Are Online Retailers Ready for Business?

Every year, more and more shoppers turn to the Web for their holiday shopping, with total sales in 2006 projected to be in the multi-billion dollar range. But will online retailers be up to the task? Our recent study suggests that many will not...

Tags: ecommerce, online retail, holiday shopping, performance, Web performance, site outages, load handling, load testing, service level, dial-up.

See the new site, here.