It has been some time since I’ve been able to get to this, for a good reason.  Multiple good reasons, actually.  Since last post, I have gotten a job, moved to New Orleans, and had another kid.

In August of last year I answered a craigslist post for a job with a web development company in New Orleans.  I heard back almost immediately, and soon after got the job.  I now work for Fusionbox in an office in the French quarter.  Fusionbox is a Denver web design company that just last year opened an office in New Orleans; I was the first employee!  I do updates for existing sites, build out and do bug work for new sites, and even do a little bit of design.

This job has given me (besides a paycheck!) a chance to learn Javascript and PHP better, because I have to deal with it on a regular basis.  Even though  the company has other people who do Javascript and PHP, I have been able to play around with it enough to get a much better grasp on it.  We often use the jQuery Javascript library, which I have used to make slideshows and clever animated mock-ups.

Ever since Mosiac, the first browser to display images, one of the primary concerns of web designers has been making their pages load quickly. People are usually not willing to put up with long waits for pages to load (even with cleverly animated preloading screens), so an effort has to be made to keep the download time as low as possible; this is often called “optimization.” Web site optimization has caused many a headache as form gave way to function. I want to look at several aspects of optimization, including reasons pages load slowly, ways to make them load more quickly, how quickly they should be expected load, et al.

First I want to look at the kinds of connections Internet users have. For years the only way to connect to the Internet for the home user was through a dial-up modem, which topped out at a mere 56 K. However, with the recent (last several years) propagation of so-called “high-speed Internet”, is speed even a concern anymore? How fast is “high-speed” Internet? Can I make my files as big as I want now? Let’s take a look.

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Ok, well it took two weeks to get the site up and worked out, primarily due to the fact that I currently reside in a part of the world where dial-up is the only available connection to the internet.  So yes, basically it takes two weeks to get a site online with dial-up.

I have been granted the use of an office that has so-called high-speed internet.  It’s mostly just usable, but I’ve yet to find a connection about which I’ve thought: “Whoah, too fast!”

I have just about finished work on my new website.  It’s all in Flash, because I’m good with Flash, it’s fun to use, it makes the site cooler, and why not?  I did learn a ton about S during this endeavor that took place mostly in the two weeks after school.  I came up with the concept right before finals; it’s the best concept I had come up with so far, which is probably why I went with it.  One of the best parts is, it’s modular so I can add plenty of stuff later or change stuff as I see fit.  That’s pretty common for an HTML site, but Flash sites tend to be self-contained, one-time designs that remain the same until the re-design.

So, you want to know when the site is actually going up?!  Saturday, May 17.  In the morning, or maybe the afternoon.  Be on the lookout.

Well folks, my internship at the local library is going well, and in fact we just launched the new website. It is about a trillion times better (maybe more) than the previous design. For example, it has a color scheme, and organization. I don’t mean a “better” color scheme and organization; I mean a color scheme and organization, period. I designed the layout and did all the graphical work on the site, while the webmaster did most of the actual coding. We used some stock photography and some stock vector graphics, but most of it is made by me in Illustrator and Flash.

Not everything is exactly how I would have chosen to do it, as we had to present it to a committee who had some ideas about how it should be, but I guess that’s always to be expected. Since this is my first site that’s actually going online, I hadn’t really had to deal with that before.  Overall I’m pretty satisfied as to how it turned out, and definitely excited to have some work of mine online.

Now that it’s online and I still have time to spend there, I’m working on some new graphics for different parts of the site.  I’ve also been introduced to practical applications in Javascript and PHP, in which my education has been decidedly lacking.  I have read a couple of books on Javascript, and an online tutorial on PHP, but I have never actually used them in a web page.  Sad.

I have started my internship now; I am interning with the webmaster at the public library here. One of the main reasons I chose the library was because I would get paid for it, but I’m really glad I did. As things are going, it’s going to work out very well. (more…)