Should I create a new Home page to save downloading times?

**Petrafin** · 01-11-2012, 01:05 AM

I bought a template and have used the parts I want. I'm happy but the download times are not good for the home page. Would it make sense to create a new index.htm page, with text and log which would then link to the renamed old index.htm

If I could preload (I don't know how) the Javascripts this would make the whole site faster and better. I only provide the url so you can see my problem www.drachsi.com

Thanks in advance, hope somebody can help?

Petrafin

**deepsand** · 01-11-2012, 01:27 AM

Setting aside the fact that that would merely delay the pain, I'm not seeing any sign of sluggishness; snapped right to in a little less than 3 seconds.

**weegillis** · 01-11-2012, 02:04 AM

Originally Posted by deepsand

... less than 3 seconds.

Same here. Very fast load in Chrome.

From what I can tell, none of your scripts need to be in the head of the document. They could all go above the </body> endtag. This way all the HTML and CSS are in place when the scripts download and execute. Remember they are not executing simultaneously, but serially, so their order might matter, as well.

Seeing a lot of mixed document type in the code. If HTML5 is the flavor you wish to validate with, then HTML5 spec should be followed as closely to the letter (and intent) as possible. HTML5 is about semantics, and there is a lot of 'classitis' in this code that can easily be done away with, or at least made more semantic in the naming.

Eg.

HTML Code:

<h1 class="style2">
<a class="style1" href="index.htm" style="height: 50px">
<span class="auto-style4" lang="en-gb">Business management resources</span></a></h1>

The h1 is in the header. A CSS selector can hook it with,

Code:

header h1 {
 /* properties specified in 'style2' */
}
header h1 a {
 /* properties specified in 'style1' */
 /* include height property and remove inline style */
}
header h1 a span {
 /* properties specified in 'auto-style4' */
}

Now your HTML will look like,

HTML Code:

<h1><a href="/"><span lang="en-gb">Business management resources</span></a></h1>

HTML Code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Business management resources. Your Virtual Webmaster</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">..

should look like this:

HTML Code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Business management resources. Your Virtual Webmaster</title>..

All of the SCRIPT and STYLE tags can have their type attributes removed. JavaScript and CSS are the default for browsers, and HTML5 has allowed the moot to fall away.

The HOME page should have "/" as a URL, not the URI specific "index.htm". This will come back and bite you in the backside down the road when you want to switch to PHP or ASP, or whatever pre-processing you may get into. Also, the HOME page links on the home page should not have an href (title attribute is fine) or should have a page fragment for an href (#main, for example). In things NOT to do on a home page, link to itself practically tops the list.

All minor things, but every little bit that moves you to a standard and semantic document makes it better, and future work much easier.

**jhannawin** · 01-12-2012, 04:21 AM

Originally Posted by weegillis

The HOME page should have "/" as a URL, not the URI specific "index.htm".

I'm not sure I agree with that. Provided that the site is consistent in how implicit URLs are handled, and canonicalisation is considered I can see nothing wrong with using an explicit "index.htm".

**weegillis** · 01-12-2012, 01:38 PM

Originally Posted by jhannawin

I'm not sure I agree with that. Provided that the site is consistent in how implicit URLs are handled, and canonicalisation is considered I can see nothing wrong with using an explicit "index.htm".

While I don't disagree with your view on this, I've had enough problems 'down the road' when years later a major change goes through (as mentioned above). Those pages that are indexed will need to be redirected. If only the relative path to the file is indexed, and not the URI the pages can change their extensions without needing a redirect, provided the new page becomes the server default.

The recommendation is merely an 'avoidance alert', not SEO--future proofing to allow for change.

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