Website Validation and Optimization
While I spend most of my time adding or fixing features on Salem-News.com, every now and then I have to remember to check for validity and optimization.
The first step I take is to use The W3C Markup Validation Service. An invaluable free service allowing you to easily see a broad range of mistakes such as non valid attributes, failure to close tags or improperly nested tags.
A large amount of errors came on my first try using the validation services. Errors I never saw from my browsers, but I hate bringing up my site from a friends computer only to see it displayed horribly. But it only took a few changes with the help of the validation service to bring it into at least 4.01 translational compliance.
Next I wanted to check on load time, which I knew would be bad because of the large number of images, and many nested tables. There were quite a few results googling for a speed analyzer and I ended up preferring Web Page Analyzer - free website optimization tool website speed test check website performance report from web site optimization.
My initial tests showed up at over 800k for all html, images, javascript and css combined. Most of this was from the large number of images, and I knew of know way to get rid of that and still be able to keep the lay out preferred. But by optimizing the larger images (opening with Gimp and saving at 75 to 80% usually greatly reduces file size without reducing quality enough to be noticed), getting rid of a lot of the tables (Still more to come), reducing some of the redundant CSS, and removing unneeded white space from the html and css, stopped thumbnails from showing on articles toward the bottom of the front page. I did get it reduced to 465k so about 40%. Still a long way from what the service recommends but far better than what it was.
While removing unneeded whitespace from files seemed to do little, if you remove 1k or 2k per page view it can aded up dramatically on a heavily traveled site.
Next goal is to remove all unneeded tables and go xhtml