Thibauld - Imagination and Execution -

Web application implementation: a bad example

I recently went to a website which is a perfect example of what *not* to do if you want your web app to feel fast and responsive from a user perspective, especially when it is the first this user comes to your site! Indeed, the first time you go to a website, your web browser will have to download everything: html code, css stylesheets, javascript files, images... and it takes time so you'd better limit the number of files to download if you want the user first experience with your web app to be user friendly.

This is clearly not what moblin solution zone is doing! When you first go to moblin solution zone, you have to wait 25 seconds (!!) before anything displays on your web browser... and what is funny is that there is finally not much to see

If you fire up your brave little firebug and take a look at what is happening behind the scene, you quickly realize that your web browser has to make 40 (fourty) requests before displaying the full page!

Even though each request is relatively small, at the end you wait 25 seconds only to see this:

In conclusion, if you want your users to have a good experience when they first visit your website, you'd better minimize the number of requests needed by grouping js files, css files and using CSS sprites. CSS sprites are a technique which consists in grouping all images like icons into 1 unique image and then use css to only display the image needed. This is really important for the user first visit to your web app since when he comes back, his web browser will have cached a lot of the needed static files which will vastly improve the response time! Provided you set your apache default_expire setting correctly of course...