Web Developer Musings

With download speeds getting faster all the time it is easy to get complacent with graphics and Javascript. Though I'm a fan of minimalistic web design - which inherently means fast display times - I am happy to see new websites with attractive, highly illustrative layouts or large photographic backgrounds that can be delivered quickly. However, over the last few days it has been plaguing me that some web designers are becoming careless. I looked at one new creative website that took nearly 8 seconds to load, cramming just under 2MB of style (no visual content) down my creaking copper phone line.

When I build sites I pass them through the usual test of XHTML validation but I'm also a fanatic of optimisation and for that I use Pingdom Tools. It's a free, online service that shows without any fluff the load times for each element on a web page.

I tested this website using the service and my result can be seen below. Pingdom Tools is easy to understand and hopefully encourages the Internet to be an attractive and streamlined wonder.