50 Web design tips to Speed Up Site

There are all sorts of tips and tools included, from reducing the number of HTTP requests to compressing images and playing with caches. Here are six articles that I wrote on the topic some time ago (they were included on the list) :

1. Speed Up Your Site: Optimize Images
2. Speed Up Your Site: Image Formats
3. Speed Up Your Site: Optimize your CSS
4. Speed Up Your Site: Use a slash on your links
5. Speed Up Your Site: Use the height and width tags
6. Speed Up Your Site: Reduce the HTTP Requests

Source : 50 Tips to Speed Up Your Website

Flash Design tutorials lessons for intermediate & advanced users

Listed below are a few tutorials created with beginners in mind. They will help you learn the basics of how to use Flash:

1. How to make a flash cartoon head animation

2. Stick man animation

3. How to make a scrolling background animation in Flash

4. How to create and use motion tweens Adobe Flash


Intermediate users are those animators who already understand the basics of using the toolbar. The following Flash tutorials are aimed at those intermediate users:

1. How to make Flash navigation buttons

2. How to make a smooth rotating circle

3. How to make a ball bounce

4. How to create Flash text animations


While our list of advanced Flash tutorials and lessons include:

1. How to zoom in a Flash movie clip, then re-scale it

2.How to use game sprites

3. Action scripting for Flash car game

4. How to make game animations using Sprites : demonstrates how to make them move etc.

5. Using Flash to add animations to a video movie

6. Create a volume sound slider

7. How to make a Flash preloader

Source : Free Flash tutorials Macromedia Adobe lessons

Milestone’s Top 10 Website Programming Guidelines

1. Use clean CSS (cascading style sheets) codes
2. If websites are built on a dynamic platform, make sure that your Content Management System is search engine friendly
3. Keep your codes clean by calling all java scripts and CSS using an include file
4.Use keyword rich H1 TAGS
5.Use ALT Tags for images to enable your site to be read by visitors with visual/hearing impairments and name all your images keyword rich
6. Keep the download time low by reducing images on the site
7. Float the content right at the top and make it easy for the crawler to index your page
8. Make sure phone numbers and address are on every page as text
9. Use Absolute Links, no relative links
10. Check for browser compatibility so the site appears the same across all platforms

Source : Top 10 Website Programming Guidelines

9 Important Tips for a fast loading web site

It is important to have a reasonably fast loading web site so that viewers are not made to wait for a long time and to accommodate users on slow internet connections. Search engine algorithms also do take into consideration your load time.

Follow these tips while designing and developing your site:

1. Optimize your HTML code: Make sure that your site doesn't have any unwanted tags and that it is optimized.

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. Maximize content area: This not only reduces load time, it enhances the readability of your site.

4. Minimize use of graphics, Flash, scripts: These are the major contributors to the size of your web page, so try minimizing them. Try using background colors and fills instead of heavy images.

5. Optimize all heavy files: As much as possible optimize heavy graphics, Flash files and scripts. In editors like fireworks and flash you can see the various options in the preview panel to reduce the sizes. See how popular web sites like google and yahoo have pages that are very small in size and thus load in seconds.

6. Stick to simple designs: Most fast loading sites have very simple designs. Take the hint! Complicated designs will slow down your pages.
Spread out your content: In case you find yourself having very long pages of content, break them down into separate sections and thus bring down the sizes of the individual pages.

7. Use Text Links instead of graphic buttons: basically try to make use of HTML as much as possible. Use CSS Styles for text links to make them as attractive as buttons. Read our CSS Styles tutorial

8. Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster.

9. Using Layers instead of tables is a new concept for better load time. We will be bringing out an article on it soon.


Source : http://www.smartwebby.com/web_site_design/fast_loading_websites.asp

Top Ten Absolutely Free Websites for Downloading Cool Fonts

The following list of websites is the best compilation of sites on the web where you can download many different fonts totally free. Also, there are a variety of different types of fonts and styles you can download from the following sites so start searching today. Keep in mind that these sites are not listed in any particular order.

#1 www.1001freefonts.com/links.htm

Great site because it ranks other font websites in order of popularity as well as having more than 1,000 different fonts to download for free. This website is certainly a great resource if you need a lot of fonts and don’t want to pay for them!

#2 www.acidfonts.com

This is also a great website if you simply want to visit one site and download fonts without having to search multiple websites. At acidfonts.com you will be able to download a variety of different fonts for your PC and even convert the fonts over to your Mac if you want. This website will certainly provide you with the fonts you need for your website and business.

#3 www.1001fonts.com

This website may easily be confused with the first website listed, however it is completely different and also has a great selection for free font downloads. There are fonts available for the PC as well as Macs, so anyone can get the fonts they need from this website for free.

#4 www.coolarchive.com

This website is really cool, as it says in its name, because not only can you download over 1000 fonts completely free, there is also clipart, sounds, icons, applications, bars, bullets, and arrows. Most anything you need to design your website just the way you want is available on this site. If you are not sure how to download and install a font then read the FAQs to find out how.

#5 www.fontfreak.com

This is an amazing website with literally thousands upon thousands of fonts to download and dingbats as well. This is a highly rated website and completely free.

#6 www.downloadfreefonts.com

This is another great website because when you enter you can either choose Mac or PC or the top 20 font websites. From either Mac or PC you will be able to download the fonts you like most or you can visit all of the different top websites to check out the font availability and diversity.

#7 free.sinoa.com/FreeFonts/index.htm?29

Check out the different fonts available and then download the ones you like best or that suit your purposes best all for free!

#8 www.highfonts.com

A wide variety of fonts are available on this website, not to mention over 1001 free fonts to choose from. This site has a lot to offer and directs you to some good free font links as well.

#9 www.abstractfonts.com/fonts/

Great website for free fonts as well as other font related information you might find helpful.

#10 www.freefontsnow.com

This website has fonts for both Mac and PC and is yet another great way to search for fonts as well. You can either search categories to look for particular styles of fonts, or you can search by first letter if you already know the name of your font.



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