Posts Tagged ‘load speed’

When we changed our blog’s URL structure all the counts on our “tweet” buttons got reset to zero.

Changin the URL structure on your blog is a painful process but we decided it was a necessary change for the greater good! Unfortunately there is no work around the fact that you’ll lose your tweet counts displayed by the Tweetmeme button since the script counts the tweets based on the permalink URLs. Once the permalink structure changes, it’s basically like if you had completely new posts and pages all together, even if you have permanent re-directions setup properly. (more…)

I often get asked for recommendations on which hosting company to choose to host a Magento site. If you want your Magento site to run smoothly and to load fast, you will need a Magento Optimized Hosting service.

There are a lot of choices out there when looking for a hosting company which is optimized for Magento. I didn’t test them all but I did test a few and I’ve had the best experience with Nexcess Magento Hosting so I can definitely recommend them. They have plans starting at $24.95/mth and their most basic plan would fit the bill for most projects.

Adding an Official Twitter Widget on your website is quite simple. They even give you a wizard that helps you personalize the look & feel. But using the script will slow down your website because it has to load the file and access the Twitter API while at the same time your website is loading.

So we did a little trick and changed the script to wait until the website has fully loaded and only then allow the Widget to start loading tweets. Let’s check out the code! (more…)

Check out SpriteMe – it’s a very interesting site. I haven’t personally used it but it seems like a great tool to improve older websites that weren’t coded with CSS Sprites without taking the time to actually combine images and change the CSS. There is also a website that combine images for you.

Of course the best way to optimize a website for load speed using CSS Sprites is to do it manually and to follow Yahoo’s guidelines.

About 5 months ago, we published a blog post containing the details of one of our innovative concepts. In the post, we took Gmail as a great example of a widely used rich internet application that could benefit from the concept.

Recently, the Gmail team implemented the idea we published almost literally with a new lab: inbox preview. The only 2 things missing are:

1. Keep the preview open in an overlay lightbox even after the entire Gmail interface has loaded (and add a close button)
2. Add the ability to click on a message in the inbox preview that would lead to the message (right now the inbox preview is static)

Hello Everyone,

As a Sr. Web Programmer here at Noam Design, I always look for ways to optimize the code I develop for efficiency. I primarily do back-end programming with PHP and MySQL. Today I am going to share with you some tips that I have personally encountered while programming with PHP. I hope these 15 tips will help you optimize your PHP code and get you into the habit of looking for alternative ways or patterns of writing robust code. Also don’t forget to document your code properly! Enjoy! (more…)

Here, at Noam Design, we are constantly contributing to the web design world community and we’ve often pioneered new practices and innovative concepts within the industry. What we call ‘Load Sequencing’ and ‘Content Flushing’ are two ways to tremendously enhance the user experience for websites and web applications that are rich in design and/or features. These concepts allow for the almost instantaneous fetching of web content to the user, while other elements of the website or web application are seamlessly loading.

What is it all about?

In today’s internet browsing experience, there is nothing more frustrating and outdated than waiting for a web page to load.  We believe that when you go to a website, you shouldn’t have to wait for the site’s content to load, but rather you should be able to view relevant content right away – or at least be entertained while the main content of the page is loading. In other words, some web content should be fetched to the user immediately. For simple, light weight websites, the question may not be as critical. But for websites and web applications that are rich in features and/or design, it’s of the utmost importance. Especially given that more than 80% of all internet use is spent on rich web applications! Web based emailing and chatting, social networking, and video browsing, etc are just a few examples. (more…)