Thursday, October 18, 2007 Toral: Website improvement tools By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
ONE of the problems that website owners have to tackle is improving their sites. As components are added to it, loading performance may become slow, which will disappoint visitors.
I was reading the book, “High Performance Web Sites,” authored by Steve Souders (published by O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 0-596-52930-9) and realized a lot about the problems happening in my website right now. The book by itself is quite technical. If you haven’t been touching your code for awhile or do hard coding, it can be overwhelming. However, through it, I discovered two great tools that I am now using to assess and improve my website.
One of which is Firebug (http://getfirebug.com). This free tool that works with the Firefox browser allows you to edit, monitor, and debug your website code. Another one that I installed afterwards is YSlow (http://deve-loper.yahoo.com/yslow). This Yahoo made tool analyzes a web page and tells you why your web site is slow. It works hand-in-hand with Firebug. As I was using these, I saw several issues in the digitalfili- pino.com website that need to be fixed for the site to work faster.
Improving the front-end experience of our website is something that we must continually work on. With so many online competitors today, web site visitors are no longer as patient unless they badly want specific information that only you can provide. From an Internet professional or programmer point of view, it is also pushing oneself to strive for perfection and better quality of work.
What was great about Souders’ book is that its online compliment includes a blog and even a discussion board for each of the 14 rules (http://developer. yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) that take the learning process to a very productive level. It has a lot of examples where you can gain ideas on how to shape up your website further.
Even non-technical people can benefit from the lessons it shares. In the end, what you want to see are better grades appearing in YSlow after implementing the suggested changes it gave earlier. You can get more information about this at http://digitalfilipinoclub. blogspot.com
Blogging and the 2010 Elections. As I’ve shared a few weeks ago, there will be an iBlog Mini forum that intends to tackle how bloggers can participate in the 2010 elections. This will be on Nov. 24 at University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. Media educators and writers such as Luz Rimban, Manuel L. Quezon III, and Rachel Khan will be there to share their insights. More details can be found at http://www.iblogph. org
Politicians and poll monitoring volunteers are encouraged to take an active interest on this discussion as there is so much that can be gained by making citizens participate proactively in monitoring and share information to the public about the issues that matters for the 2010 elections.
This is needed, more than traditional election websites that just pop up during the campaign season, which are developed by those who are only trying to profit by encouraging politicians to advertise in their site. There is so much that can be done in online election coverage by citizens than just that.
