Miniseries: Ways to speed up your blog- Part II

Miniseries- PartII
Also See: Part I
In the first part we had discussed how to reduce the image size on your blog/site page. This part gives you:
7 more ways to speed up your blog:

1. Optimize your HTML Code:
Your site should not have any unwanted and benign HTML tags. This only increases the loading time. After writing each blog post, check if it has any unwanted tags; these generally creep in when you edit a post after it has been published.

2.Effective Table designing:
" Design using nested tables instead of using cell merges and splits. Use separate tables where ever possible. Not designing for 100% height is better as if you use just one outer table, the web page is displayed only after the table is loaded fully. If many outer tables are present [you can have different tables for the header, content, footer, etc.] the page displays the content of each table as soon as its elements are loaded."

3.Optimize Heavy Files ( Scripts, Flash)
Use editors like fireworks and flash there are options to reduce the file size, use them. As mentioned in Part I, check out Yahoo and Google, their pages load up in mere seconds.

4. Use Basic and Simple Templates:
The more complicated the design of your template, the more time it takes to load. If you have to use a 3-column-Template go for the minima White ones available for download everywhere. Of course, if your site needs good graphics, you cant apply this one.

5. Break your content into pages:
Don't make a page too long, with the page length, the size goes up drastically. Also, no one likes to scroll to the bottom of the page. Divide your site into many pages, but see to it that there aren't too many links a person has to click to read a single article. Divide your blog into different sections. For the same reason this blog shows just one post on the front page.

6.Use text links, avoid graphic buttons:
Try to make use of HTML as much as possible. Use CSS Styles for text links to make them as attractive as buttons. Read this CSS Styles tutorial.

7. Don't add graphic Ads:
Use text link Ads instead of Graphic Ads, this saves some precious space and doesn't matter much. Use the above tutorial to make different cool text links.

I hope you can utilize some of these ways to speed up your blog. I have seen many people making these mistakes, I myself made these mistakes and learnt from it, please keep them in mind while you design/redesign your next site. I do believe these make a lot of difference in how many readers visit your site.
What do you think? Do these things really matter, or is it a waste of time?

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