Archive for Best sites
The world this week, on a single page
July 29th, 2007 • Best sites
The Week Ahead | BBC Monitoring
First time I’ve encountered this service - an essential bookmark if you need to know what your fellow six billion humans will face from their governments this week.
Does anyone use this stuff?
July 26th, 2007 • Best sites, Internet
Am I alone is finding this kind of exercise unsatisafying? Guess not: the site you’ll enjoy thanks to the link above has just collected a mention on Web Pages That Suck. Reminds me of a portfolio supplied by a web designer recently: the screen showed an incomplete sphere gently rotating, similar to the BT logo. I assumed that this was a Flash loader - any second now, a ‘percentage complete’ message would appear. But oh no - after 30 seconds, I managed to hover my cursor over one of the moving surfaces. Up popped ‘Home’. This was the navigation.
Does your site pass the YSlow test?
July 26th, 2007 • Best sites, Internet
So yesterday Yahoo! finally releases the YSlow pug-in. I kind of new it was coming - I’d attended the @media London conference a month or two back, and one of Yahoo’s Exceptional Performance team guys announced that it was coming.
Every developer and designer on my team now has it installed. The verdict after a day? Very cool, if a little harsh. The only sites we could get to score an ‘A’ (best) were Yahoo!’s search page and the same thing at Google (Ask, would you believe, scores a ‘C’).
Everything else seems to be an ‘F’ (worst), from BBC News to What Car? to CNN.
Which struck me as just a little misleading, nay dangerous. Both the Beeb and What Car? launch plenty quickly for me. Yet somewhere, a boss hears that his star site is scoring an ‘F’. Mmmm…
TimesOnline - the new jewel in Murdoch’s crown?
July 25th, 2007 • Best sites, Business, Media
Now here’s a surprise. Well, a surprise to me, anyway. I’m no fan of The Times Online - probably because I find it hard to read (pushes glasses back onto bridge of nose). But the rest of the British public seem to be going the other way, according to latest ABCe figures.
Still, who am I to judge? I also can’t grasp people’s adoration of The Guardian, and that it the most popular of all.
Previous market position was broadly maintained, with the exception of the Times which overtook the Sun and moved back into position as the nation’s second most popular newspaper website, according to the ABCe unique user metric.Guardian Unlimited still leads the field as the most widely read UK newspaper site. However, it slipped 9.6 per cent month-on-month to 14.5m unique users in June from 16.1 million in May.
Joost: one million and counting
July 25th, 2007 • Best sites, Business, Television, Video
Joost - The new way of watching free, full-screen, high-quality TV on the internet
And we are about to go live on the service. Dead excited. Oh, I know that there are new ways of delivering video springing up from every corner. But there’s something about Joost that’s right - maybe it’s the ‘oooh, it’s just like Sky on your PC’ interface - or the MyJoost section with the clever IM client and the RSS feeds. Don’t know.
Either way, I can’t wait for the Stuff.tv shows to be seen by a new audience.
The world’s worst website?
July 24th, 2007 • Best sites, Strange
My thanks to Web Pages That Suck for a delightful 20 mins. They’ve just announced The Worst Web Sites of 2007 (sic), and while all of them are high in odour, you can’t help but enjoy the irony of UsabilityNet.
Had a look? Great, isn’t it. Now go back and do some reading. You’ll see that it’s supported by the EU, and they - from what I can see - give grants (using their money of course, not ours).
Now, I’m following their guidelines - ensure that your navigation is almost illegible, and use buttons with minute fonts against dark grey backgrounds. Are you writing all of this down? Now go for a home page structure that has no discernible hierarchy. Now add some hardcore web-speak, just in case the poor novice reading your usability site risks understanding more than two words of it. Wonderful.
How to make your site faster
July 24th, 2007 • Best sites, Internet
Spent a little time yesterday discussing with a web team what constituted a ‘responsive’ site. Good conversation: Alex has anything between 1-2 seconds as ‘average’, which we immediately agreed with unrealistic unless you had a 16kb home page. Consensus? Four seconds for enough to read / navigate - if you’re there, you’re happy for non-essentials to load in anything up to 10 seconds.
But ignore our rambles. The good folk at Yahoo have just released a rulebook for making your site a whole lot zippier. And here they are…
Rules for High Performance Web SitesThe Exceptional Performance team has identified 13 rules for making web pages fast. Each rule is discussed in the Developer Network Blog articles listed below.
1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags
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