EightBlack.

I suppose I should have expected it. But it’s still an impressive sight.

And the Yanks, for the most part, do this stuff better than anyone else.

10,000 people from 57 countries all coming together for Web 2.0 Expo. Or at least, thats’ what the brochure says. It doesn’t look like 10,000 people but then again, there are simultaneous conferences running at this centre - and later I learned that Bill Clinton was next door, addressing an army of school board educators. For once, I felt sorry for Bill.

There’s free wireless in the whole conference centre (makes sense) but lets see how it copes once everyone starts firing up their laptops.

My first session is titled “High Performance Web Pages” by Steve Souders and Tenni Theurer from Yahoo!. There are 5 simultaneous sessions running this morning, but I chose this session because I was drawn to the headline.

Thats right. Yahoo!

People who read this blog might get the impression that I’m anti-Yahoo!

I’m not. I’m just not plugged into their brand. I don’t use their search interface, I dont use Yahoo! groups, I dont use Yahoo! mail. I’m also a little confused as to what Yahoo is and what it isn’t.

It was obvious that Steve and Tenni were extremely clever - Steve is the Chief Performance Officer at Yahoo! and is responsible for all Yahoo! properties online in terms of how they work from a usability perspective.

As we were sitting waiting for the session to start, they were running a Firefox extension called “YSlow”. I think its a proprietary Yahoo! application that essentially performance tests any website (damn, I wish we were able to access it).

The start to the session was sort of wierd. It started 15 mins late because apparently there was complete mayhem downstairs at registration. It was sort of like a University lecture, a sort of informal introduction then boom, straight into content.

The audience didn’t seem to care. Man, were there some serious propeller heads in the room and the thing I love about attending these sorts of gigs in the US, is that, if someone in the audience doesn’t understand, they’ll just raise their hand and ask a question. Or in this case, just yell out. Right in front of 224 people they don’t even know.

And the questions started flying after about 13 seconds.

In Australia, most of us wouldn’t want to appear a wanker so we sit there and wonder when they’ll open up the bar. And if you’ve ever been to a conference in the UK, the silly English take 15 minutes introducing themselves and manage to somehow fit the Queen into the conversation. But I digress.

The session.

Man, it was tough. For me anyway. Too many propeller heads. And too many ego’s all wanting to kick the intellectual crap out of the 2 Yahoo! folks.

For those technically minded, Steve talked in detail about The 14 Rules For High Performance Websites. Here they are:

1. Make fewer HTTP requests
2. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network like Akamai)
3. Add an expires header
4. Gzip components
5. Put CSS at the top
6. Move JS to the bottom
7. Avoid CSS expressions
8. Make JS and CSS external
9. Reduce DNS lookups
10. Minify JS
11. Avoid redirects
12. Remove duplicate scripts
13. Turn off eTags
14. Make AJAX cacheable and small

They then went on to talk about how they define web performance and they break it into 2 categories
- response time
- efficiency

The current focus for Yahoo! is response time of pages or web products (not messenger, toolbar)

An essential link for all web designers is this: IBM Page detailer.
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/pagedetailer

80-90% of the end user response time is spent on the front end. Start there.
- greater potential for improvement
- simpler
- proven to work

What is the end users experience? Critical question to ask when designing pages. Perceived response time is paramount (exception is online travel sites)

Yahoo User Interface Blog seems to be a good resource for those wanting to know more.

Summary:

Steve and Tenni did a good job. It was a tough audience and as soon as Steve announced he was releasing a new book in the US Summer, the audience were determined to add their 2 cents worth, whether Steve asked for it or not.

There was a lot of content, and apparently the entire presentation will be posted somewhere later. The IBM Page Detailer link, the Top 14 Rules and the powerpoint deck (once we get it) are all useful tools. I rate the session 7 out of 10.

And by the way, the free wireless had a heart attack after the 90th person switched on their PC. No matter.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.