The Fast and the Fabulous: 9 ways engineering and design come together to make your site slow.

1:45pm–3:15pm Monday, 06/22/2009
Web Performance
 Location: Regency 2 Level: Intermediate
Presentation: external link
Average rating: ***..
(3.29, 17 ratings)

Designers make our code as beautiful and clever on the outside as it is on the inside, but for the moment we don’t collaborate with them to improve performance. This presentation will cover the 9 best-practices for fast design and the change in engineering mindset necessary to write fast, object-oriented CSS.

  1. Create a component library of smart objects
  2. Use consistent semantic styles
  3. Design modules to be transparent on the inside.
  4. Optimize images and sprites.
  5. Avoid non-standard browser fonts.
  6. Use columns rather than rows.
  7. Choose your bling carefully.
  8. Be flexible.
  9. Learn to love grids.

Practical examples from Nicole’s work on high traffic websites such as Yahoo!, Renault, Accor Hotels, SFR, etc.

Photo of Nicole Sullivan

Nicole Sullivan

Stubbornella

Nicole Sullivan is a performance guru and CSS Ninja. She is writing about Image Optimization for “Even Faster Websites”, an upcoming book for O’Reilly. She is also working on the redesign of the W3C website.

Previously, she researched and improved the performance of Yahoo sites worldwide as a part of their YSlow team.

She is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for sites with large numbers of pages and visitors. She speaks about performance at conferences around the world, most recently at Ajax Experience and ParisWeb.

She has enjoyed working on large commercial sites including; Yahoo!, SFR, FNAC, Club Med, Accor, Renault, SNCF, and La Poste. She writes on her blog http://stubbornella.org as well as other developer sites such as YDN, Opera, and YUI Blog.

  • Keynote Systems
  • Google
  • Shopzilla
  • Aptimize
  • Facebook
  • NeuStar
  • Rackspace Cloud
  • Schooner Information Technology
  • SoftLayer
  • SpringSource
  • Sun Microsystems

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