Before I installed the web developer plugin for firefox and found a useful tool that gives advice and measures a site's performance, I never really had much of a thought on optimising a website's codes to allow it run efficiently. Why? I always assume that with the increase in speed of broadband, we can safely neglect the overheads in our coding. Well, this has changed in recent years, I think it is due to the following factors:

Emergent of 3G data services on mobile devices allows web browsing using a handheld device much easier than before.
Streaming services are becoming the major bandwidth hogger on the net

and hmm... well that's all I can think of at the time of writing, in any case, I found that tool extremely useful and I've done a lot of optimising for the ICMA Centre's website, take a look at the stats here compared to the Reading University's new website here

I think I've done pretty well, I've enabled gzip encoding on the html and css and to my suprise, the effect of these small reduction of size is quite noticeable and significant when you take into account the number of people accessing the website every day. This I believe should be what every web designer, developer and studio should be focusing on, but as you see on the University's website, there are no optimisations in terms of encoding or reducing picture size, and a lot of websites today do not have that either, so it makes me wonder, how many website design agencies out there are actually capable of making a "proper" website?

Well, in any case, I've made a mini-frontpage on citisky.net now, it's kinda still shitty but I'll do something about it during the easter break, right now I have 2 weeks left and about 5 coursework to do. So, until then.

Need a new CPU or graphics card? Get AMD.