Sheila Millward
Sheila Millward is a mixed media artist living in Leamington Spa. She asked us to take a look at her website because it was very slow, even on fast internet connections.
Website Healthcheck
We gave the site a free website healthcheck and reported our findings. Visually the site was great and Sheila was happy with it. However, the site was heavily graphic-based, and the graphics were not very well compressed. We also discovered that the server that was hosting the site was incorrectly configured so that images where not cached which made viewing the site very slow.
Client-Side Scripting
Another problem with the existing site was that it relied heavily on client-side scripting. This means that the site was unusable for any visitors that did not have JavaScript enabled, and that search engines could not easily index the site.
Improvements
The first thing we did was to remove all unnecessary images, and compress the images that were left. The old site had used images to display large amounts of text. We replaced these with suitably styled titles and paragraphs. Not only did this greatly reduce the size of the site, but also means the site will be indexed better by search engines.
We were able to massively reduce the file size of the images that were left without noticeably reducing the quality. We also replaced graphical rollovers with CSS style rules to achieve a similar effect without needing extra images.
We still used JavaScript to give an enhanced user experience, but added non-JavaScript fallbacks to cater for visitors without scripting enabled, and to allow the site to be indexed by search engines. At Sheila's request we also added large image pop-ups, also with a non-script fallback.
The existing hosts were not willing to correctly configure their server to allow image-caching so we moved the site onto our server.
The result is a site that looks visually almost identical, but gives a better user-experience, can be indexed by search engines, and even with the larger popup images is around half the size.
Visit Sheila Millward - www.sheilamillward.co.uk
