{"id":8933,"date":"2014-02-12T13:41:11","date_gmt":"2014-02-12T21:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=8933"},"modified":"2017-01-17T16:34:32","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T00:34:32","slug":"refreshing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/refreshing\/","title":{"rendered":"Refreshing"},"content":{"rendered":"
Early last year, we mentioned that we were launching a new site, and we had planned to spend the year adding features and improvements.<\/p>\n
The problem is, after a few months of that, the site got complicated. And before long, we started second-guessing our decisions. We realized we’d have been better off starting with a different (simpler) framework. We felt that we were piling on features, like full podcast support, and it was just slowing down the site. A lot.<\/p>\n
My biggest concern was the home page<\/strong>. While it appeared to load quickly, no matter where it was hosted it ended up taking at least 10 seconds<\/strong> to completely load. And while our visitors didn’t notice or mind, search engines did. And if your site appears slow, you get a penalty for that. It hurt our ranking in search results, and that’s not cool. On a slow connection, or a cell phone, it could get painful.<\/p>\n Now we’re at a nice dedicated host with a content delivery network set up, which means all the media loads a ton faster. It’s clearly better. We’ve stripped out unnecessary junk like the two sliders on the home page, which made it extremely slow. And taking out other features we weren’t really using helped a lot.<\/p>\n Another big concern of mine was the work pages<\/strong>. You wouldn’t see a single image until you were halfway down the page. The solution was an image that ran from the top of the page, down both sides, filling much of the screen right away. On top of that we added a device image to show the work in action, as well as a title and brief lede paragraph. We can even set the foreground and background accent colors, which makes each page feel a lot more personal.<\/p>\n Finally, our podcast The Job<\/a> has a new home, with a second season on the way. A new logo, too.<\/p>\n