A year in review: 2013
My portfolio site which went live in its current guise start of January 2012, is still always a work in progress and due to the iterative nature of the web is always being tweaked and improved. Time doesn’t stand still for your website, even though a site may appear the same, a lot goes on underneath the surface.
This year I made a concerted effort to improve my sites speed and efficiency.
- Went flat. I removed the texture from the site background, saving 1 background image. Removed the gradient from my share button, saving css. Later I rewrote my footer to use a linear gradient instead of a background texture, saving a further image. 2 additional http calls and 4.3Kb saved.
- Dropped many prefixes when I could, making judicious use of can-i-use? and my analytics stats.
- Removed jQuery from all but the home and LEDfin specific gallery where I use Nivo Slider for my carousels. My left nav accordion was re-written using ~1Kb of vanilla javascript and CSS3 transitions - instantly losing ~90kb of jQuery, for all but 2 pages of my site where it is needed.
- CSS Reduction 10.9Kb vs 11.3Kb at the start of the year, a small reduction but fair considering the additional lifting I am placing on it: rewritten left nav with CSS transitions, new footer gradient, plus enhanced contact and about pages. I worked hard to remove any excess.
- Spring Cleaned. A Pingdom page load test revealed I was still preloading an old [.jpg] version of my left nav sprite unnecessarily, rather than the newer .png. Important to take a look at if you have used methods to preload assets. Kept updated. WordPress has gone from v3.5.1 to 3.8 in the space of this year, the new automatic update feature will be a welcome relief.
- Started caching using W3 Total Cache which slashed 2 seconds from my page load time.
- Amended
touch-action:noneto my left nav category dropdowns to remove the 300ms click for Windows touch devices. - Overhauled my contact page, to refresh away from the stale business card layout of old.
- Rewrote Welcome Bio on homepage, reducing the bounce rate by 12%.
- Google Drive Button for my cv to allow easier saving of my details.
- Windows 8 Tile support added for site pinning.
Now with all the fat trimmed and a design that doesn’t keep me awake at night - in typical designer fashion - a new portfolio site is already past the concept stage and shall be appearing in the new year.
Anything else this year?
I continued with updates for Print Theme, my Tumblr theme in the Tumblr theme garden.
I also joined CodePen, a site to post code demos, where I had moderate success with ‘Much Content’ and my CSS 1K entry which ‘became a thing’.
During the holidays I just released ‘Pi Prompts’ a crib sheet of basic Pi commands.
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