A lot of people will talk about how important it is for your website to be fast, especially for websites that face your customers. But what about internal websites for your employees. Could a faster website boost productivity? Their productivity is a cost that you may want to optimize. Now several studies have shown that even a few tenths of a second affect the user's perspective on a website, and how likely they are to want to use it. But I've heard several owners say how they are not as … [Read more...]
Customer Training @ SunGard Public Sector
I took over the Training & Development websites for SunGard Public Sector in 2007. I was tasked with redesigning the interface and managing the training system. This legacy application is written in ASP Classic and connects to a SQL Server 2008 database. The database was updated from SQL Server 2000 when I started on the project. I found several defects in the system that was purchased, and started redesigning core components over the next several years. This included redesigning the … [Read more...]
South Florida Putting Greens
I took over this site several years ago. It was originally designed by another company, however, the site was taking a long time to load, and did not provide for an easy way for customers to contact the company. I initially redesigned the layout of the website, shaving off almost a megabyte of download per page by optimizing the navigation structure. This was done using CSS Sprites, and removing table based layouts. This produced a faster downloading site, that appeared quicker to the end … [Read more...]
Building Effective Landing Pages – An Example
Going live today are thousands of landing pages. You know those pages when you click on a link from an email that you receive, or a "sponsored list"/ad from a website or search engine. Many of these landing pages will be well done, but others will not. Today we will look at one example of a landing page that is going live today, to give you an idea of what to look for in a good landing page. This page loads fast! In fact, in our testing it displays under a half a second, and is finished … [Read more...]