As many people notice on a daily basis, the speed of the internet and the capacity of computers to put fancy videos and images on the screen has exploded the last decade. But at the same time with the introduction of smart phones, netbooks and public wifi a lot of people are using limited devices to surf overcrowded bandwith space in the hope of finding some information. Or even in developing countries where connection speeds over 1 Mbit are rare or not available.

Lately I have been surfing a lot of those connections with my Asus EEE pc and that’s when you notice how annoying it can be some websites don’t take this group of consumers in thought when they design their websites. Some simple tips to avoid common pitfalls. This will increase the happiness visitors feel when visiting your site and might just make it more preferable than one of your competitors.

Imagine sitting in a sweaty 32 C internet cafe in the heartlands of Peru. 26 computers in as much square meters with half of them blaring counterstrike action. The owner advertises with 512 Kpbs superfastcool speed (shared by all computers). The browser is Internet Explorer 5.5 unpatched and you only want to check your mail and search for a nearby vegetarian restaurant. This takes about a hour since websites are clogged with unneeded crap, intro’s, google maps and more. Even worse the browser crashes four times because it cannot handle the memory ubsurp and the computer is nearly dying. What kind of site would you go for? *

*true story

Compliant, scalable makeup

HTML and CSS are there for a reason. Compliant HTML serves many purposes, one of them to be able to make sites scale to the size of the clients screen. A lot of websites today don’t make good use of this by hardcoding for instance the size of the site. This makes sidebars and other information drop from the screen. Remember that a most netbooks only have 1024×678. Use CSS to set relative sizes and test how it looks on smaller screens.

I just want to login!

Frontpage don’ts

- Don’t use introduction pages like it’s 1999. Most people know how to surf the web, most people know why they come to your site and what they are looking for. Just show me the information and let me do where I came from thankyouverymuch. A total waste of valuable bandwidth and time.

- Flash and video content. Do not load them onto the first page people get to see. On a weak processor it gets horribly slow and in 99% of the cases (until visiting Youtube or so) I don’t want to see it! The new couchsurfing site is a good bad example. Only load these kind of content when as user more or less expects this. This way there is a choice if the current situation is good enough to even want to go there.

- Welcome layovers. See intro’s. Argh. Usually it’s a kind of lightbox / flash banner that slows everything to a grind, then displaying something stupid like ‘register’ (which I hardly ever want) or any other generic message distracting me, my connection and my few resources from getting where I want. Personally I don’t open sites who do this.

Cut back on Javascript

Don’t do client side Javascript what you can do server side, like loading images, setting to client settings like country or language prefences and pretty much everything else if it can be avoided. Clients are notoriously unreliable in what they claim to be, besides all the scripting eats at the capacity of slow machines. They might not even load scripts well or at all.

Embedded video, live map backdrop makes my computer walk like a dinosaur.

Content breakdown of couchsurfing frontpage

Don’t use AJAX for everything!

AJAX is the deity of Web 2.0. and while it can be handy and -yes- enables a new generation of sites but it also uses a lot of processing power and bandwidth. One of the most annoying things are AJAX-compliant site without any progress bars or indications something might be loading. That’s of no issue on your 2-seconds load time but if you have to wait 20 seconds for every page it becomes confusing. Did I click it? Is my connection still up?

Another annoying thing is waiting for a site to fully load before coming useable. For instance the new notifications bar on Facebook. It shows a number ( I got a life! ), but before being able to see all the new love I have to wait for the damn thing to load all the way, if it ever finishes loading.

Think if you really need to use AJAX or could withstand with a simple link or any other simpler solution.

Automatic dynamic refreshing?

An increasing amount of sites poll frequently if any new updates occurred on the page. Like Facebook, twitter and a lot of news sites. This is particularly worrisome on slow connections. As a consumer I have to choice which sites to leave open in the task bar for later use and I usually close sites who use this technique. That means if you are not the current CEO of Twitter I might forget about your site or spend less time on it because I notice my other queries are slowing down. Think if your information is so urgent I would like to offer bandwidth to check often.

Lean and mean output

Increasingly, website software systems like blog software, CMS software and so on tend to clog the output, especially if a lot of plugins are used. The reasoning appears to be ‘better loaded in vain than causing a rare error somewhere’. Of course, this way the amount of data needed to travel increases, making it slow. And even worse all the scripts firing up while maybe not even being used gobble must-needed memory.

Often check your sites source output for unneeded stuff and remove it. Disable or even remove plugins when they are not used.

I’m not loading one site I’m loading 32 sites! ( Zoetemeernieuws.nl which often kills my connection )

External sources

This is not always to be avoided, but be aware of how many site requests your page needs before it’s loaded. Think about querying google for it’s analytics or ad-words, a sub-domain for images, or – god forbid – content hosted externally showing on your site. Every request takes ages and usually I can write down the site names before any of those DNS-requests gets through. Try to limit as much as possible to your site only. Once the bits start flowing, maybe the whole thing is there a bit faster.

Lowlands.nl: I’ll make everything dynamic and dance. Shut up, I kill you!

Checklist

- Frequently check your code for compliance to standards
- Only use rich-content (flash,video,lot’s o images etc ) when the user can expect this and try to limit it when possible
- Keep Javascript, Ajax and other consuming techniques to a minimum
- Check your own site on a slow connection and on a small screen.
- First load main content, then load sidebars.
- Limit waste like unneeded content, scripts and loading from external sources.
- Webpagetest is quite handy. So is the W3 validator

Basszje has been doing this for about ten years so maybe he’ll call himself an expert in his vain days. By no means is this page checked or optimized for any of above hints

Do you have stuff you will strongly recommend? The comments are open!

Finally a geek post again! So I’ve been using both operating systems on my EEE netbook for some time now. Window 7 starter came with the system, I did a dualboot installation of Ubuntu Netbook Remix next to it. The reason was that I liked to explore (finally) if I can make the step to using only opensource software. My needs are pretty basic; internet, wi-fi, image editing and uploading and maintaining my blog for a bit. Plus I like to listen to music. These are my findings to my specific needs ( and noobiness on both OS ). Along the road sometimes I need more performance ( video’s ) but also long battery times when doing simple stuff and not having a socket ready somewhere.

User Interface

Windows look like, well windows. So familiar, but comes also with all the annoying things. I especially dislike to start menu, which encourages you to search for programs and having to click again to see all programs. I like to have full control what I have over there.

Tabbed browsing became better in Windows 7, but still sometimes the toolbar has a life of it’s own. It takes some tinkering around to make it small and less omnipresent since on a netbook space is everything.

I love the interface of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Every category has a handy tab and you can add favorites to the top category. It’s easy to put all your much-used-programs over there. Also the small topbar with volume control, date and time and more is great.

I also love the software center on Ubuntu which makes searching and installing stuff peanuts. Windows does it the old-fashioned way of searching, installing, clicking yes on the warning, installing, clicking yes if the program wants to check internet etc.

Performance (battery)

Beforehand I was thinking Ubuntu would win this hands down. To my surprise I declare this a draw. Both windows 7 and Ubuntu really hold out almost 10 hours when doing simple tasks. When being stressed with video or even heavier sites it goes down to 5-7 hours. Still not bad.

Performance (WIFI)

This is a hard one. Windows 7 consequently reports better Wireless connectivity than Ubuntu. What Windows calls ‘excellent’ is for Ubuntu considered as around ‘60%’. The geeks are less easily satisfied? When the signal is good both perform about the same, at the same speed.

The only thing that takes a very small swing to windows is in my experience when the connection is average or weaker Ubuntu drops the connection more often than Windows.

Applications

Firefox, Open Office, Thunderbird and what not run on both systems. Ubuntu also has Swiftfox which is neat and small. I like notepad++ better than anything, but I won’t complain about gEdit and ScitE which are good alternatives.

A thing I need Windows for is Mapsource, the sorry excuse for a application I use for my GPS. This is entirely the fault of Garmin using proprietary software. Which totally sucks . If anybody knows anything that actually works, drop it in the comments!

So far, it’s a draw if you disregard all the crap that comes pre-installed with the starter edition.

But then the graphics departement. I only need to organise, view, edit (crop, resize, sharpen, save as) my photographs. That’s it and basically nothing on Ubuntu beats IrFanView. Gtumbs doens’t have sharpen, F-Spot doesn’t do a good job either ( and it has it’s own life when it comes to tagging – no feeling at all I’m in control of my photo library ), Krita and GQview also don’t do the job. This is the single reason I need to boot into Windows more than I should. So I declare this a win for win7 for now ( anybody knows a solution to this? )

Speed!

While the EEE pc’s are not the fastest in the universe I really hate to wait for stuff to boot, pick up, etc. Ubuntu has by far the fastest interface. Windows – to my taste – too often gets slow in ‘waiting for programs’, ‘ don’t shut down updates installing’, lot’s of taskbar icons and ‘ the user is a complete moron popups ‘. Sure, with some tweaks it becomes better, but it doesn’t beat the directness of Ubuntu.

User friendliness

This is a question of taste. Ubuntu and most applications has their quarks probably making it harder to master for average users. Windows 7 has to my taste way to many questions, popups and annoying ‘features’ (like popping up when I plug in headphones; yes sir I can find the holes alright ).

The hardest part was installing Ubuntu. That mostly had to do with the weird partitioning the EEE comes with. The install itself works like a charm.

If you are used to Windows like XP then 7 is probably the easiest. If you like to fiddle around a small bit and discover something new; Ubuntu netbook remix might well be your pick. I like it anyway and I’m far from being a linux guru.

Conclusion

So to conclude this swat of text. It’s a pretty fair equal score which might look brighter on linux since it’s always considered hard to use for users who are not of the pale geeky kind. If the problem with the image programs would be fixed ( and Garmin sees the light one day – pray my children ) I’d prefer (personally) Ubuntu over Windows since it’s a bit faster, looks a bit better and fits just a bit better on the rather small screen.

What are your experiences? Welcome in the comments!