meJoe.com

We competed in AIR San Antonio a couple of weeks back and won first in both categories. Next on the list is the tri-city challenge (Houston, Austin and San Antonio). This event is put on by Knowbility.

I wrote this at work and thought I would cross post since that content is not available to the general public.

Many of you (our users) are developers and read the same channels we do. An important voice in our endeavors is Steve Souders’ (Yahoo!’s performance guy). His presentation on front-end web application performance is very useful. Here are some interesting points.

1. 80 to 90% of performance issues occur in the browser while rendering, not on the application side. This is definitely our problem.
2. Users with no files cached are prevalent (on yahoo sites).
3. Use fewer http requests: CSS sprites (very cool), combine scripts/CSS, inline images.
4. CDN (Content Delivery Network) change for a Yahoo! site improved performance by 25%. This is an easy thing to try before distributing your application architecture.
5. Modify build scripts to rename static files on every push - take advantage of expires header
6. IE won’t render until CSS is downloaded. Additionally, don’t use @import.
7. Javascript blocks parallel downloads (HTTP 1.1 allows download of two files at the same time per host name). Load them last to minimize impact of page rendering.
8. Avoid redirects

Cleaning the closet effect
You clean the closet, and next week it is full again. Make things faster, and we’ll naturally want to add new functionality that will slow it down. Performance is an on-going battle–make it part of your dev cycle.

This pipes thing is pretty cool. These guys have put a spiffy drag-and-drop interface on the ability to merge RSS feeds. This leads to interesting and simple mashups. For example, you can combine a Reuters news feed, Yahoo maps, and a geographic locater to make an interface that will actually show you news on a map.

The possibilities are literally endless because there are hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds that can all be combined in infinite ways.

There are a number of things that can improve your search rankings. They all settle around three things:

1. Convincing other sites to link to your page
2. Including lots of relevant content in text format
3. Coding your page appropriately

Links to Your Page
Getting incoming links is very important. Every time somebody links to your page, it is considered a vote by Google. The more “votes” your site has, the hight it will rank it. To see a list of sites that link to your site that Google knows about, type “link:” before the URL to your site. My website is mejoe.com. So in Google, I would type “link:http://www.mejoe.com”. This will give me a list of these sites.
Relevant Content
You can’t fake a good website. If you want people to visit your site, you have to give them a good reason. The reason should be lots of text based content. This means articles, blog entries, etc. It should be text because the search engines will analyze your page for the appearance of related key words and their relevance on the page. Don’t grab copyrighted material or use gibberish. Search engines are very smart at identifying cheaters. If you are identified as a cheater, you could get blacklisted.

Proper Coding Techniques
This is a matter of changing how you design your web pages. A lot has been written on the web about this topic. The best advice I have is to make your pages accessible to blind people as the search engines are as well. Some key points:

1. Use semantic markup. That means using HTML tags as they were intended. The first heading on your page should be <h1>, the second <h2>, etc.
2. Avoid using images in place of text. If you must do this, then place the text in the ALT parameter. Search engines can not read text in images.
3. Avoid unnecessary JavaScript. Don’t use it to link to a page. Avoid it in your navigation. Search engines can have difficulty with this.
4. Name your links appropriately. Instead of “Click here for information about learning english at our center.” use “Learn english at our center.”
5. Give your page a proper title (<title></title>).
6. Keywords in your meta tags don’t matter that much. It’s to easy for people to spam these. Put what is relevant to the page and then focus your page on the actual content.

Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidlines. They give away all the secrets. Google also offers a Webmaster Help Center.

This has been an interesting topic for me recently.  Some stuff I’d like to check out:

Community 2.0: Measuring the Success of Online Communities

Anything on the Community 2.0 Conference this past year.