[scribus] New Scribus Website

Wed Sep 25 22:33:31 UTC 2013

A couple of things about website speed. Limiting the amount of third party
scripts (ad networks are the real speed killers btw) is a good idea but
just doing that doesn't make the website fast. The first thing to make a
website fast is to push the html out fast (marca.com takes 6 seconds before
I get the first reply back, humans start to think it's slow at about 0.5
seconds). Wordpress is usually quite fast, but of course it does depend on
server load. The second part is how CSS/JS files are served. The fastest
way to do that (for smallish websites) is to serve just one file for CSS
and one for JS. Not sure if there is a Wordpress plugin but this is best
done by having a script that concatenates and minifies all included files
in a page and just serve the cached file. JS files should be included at
the bottom of the page because browsers still block while parsing and
compiling the JS. If the CSS and JS doesn't change across all pages of the
site, they will be loaded exactly once and then a cached version is used.
That and decent JS compressors make the size of those files a bit of a non
issue today. But of course if you have a lot of users with slow internet
connections it becomes one again. If there are a lot of images on the page
generate image tags with width and height attribute so the renderer doesn't
have to reflow the whole page when the image arrives at a later point.

In summary: Flashy junk isn't a great idea in general (football sites seem
to be the exception and each I've seen is terrible). But that is true for
almost all design and with a couple simple optimisations the designer
really doesn't have to worry about the number of framework files (use them!
You end up writing one anyway) and can focus on the important stuff:
Usability and look and feel as primary goals. And maintainability as a
secondary target.

As a side note: If I had to decide anything I wouldn't decide on a CMS
before talking about what the site needs to do. I usually find a CMS like
Wordpress very lacking if you need to do things that aren't supported by
default or if you need to change a plugin. But then again I like web
development, so I suppose I'm biased towards solutions that are tailored to
a problem.

Let me know if you need help with the development btw. I'm happy to bang
out some code if that helps. Not sure about the long term maintenance. Not
that I wouldn't want to, but promises like that never seem to work all that
well.

regards,
Jan

P.S. Sorry for the length it's a subject I like a lot :)

On 25 September 2013 18:44, Sveinn í Felli <sveinki at nett.is> wrote:

> There's a saying that it takes years of building a good useful website -
> and just two weeks for a web-designer to destroy everything ;-)
>
> Please, whatever is done, take care of not drowning browsers in
> third-party queries, cookies, scripts, tons of webfonts and other means to
> distract from content.
>
> Most enterprise sysadmins I know already block facebook servers and have
> started eliminating google services and flash.
>
> Scribus being graphical software, I think most users probably won't
> complain about heavy image-downloads - preferably on demand.
>
> The actual scribus.net page is well within 0.3Mb total (without images),
> which is far less than many of the more _developed_ ones.
>
> Using http://analyze.**websiteoptimization.com<http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com>
> :
>
> http://www.scribus.net/ loads in 15.38 seconds (T1 1.44Mbps) and raw
> html-page with 'curl' is 0,397 seconds, while
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/ = 34.81 / 0,372 seconds
> http://www.bigissue.org.za/ = 27.10 / 1,662 seconds
> and the 'uberflashy' spanish football site Marca
> http://www.marca.com/ = exceeded the 3Mb limit, just the html-code
> 'curl's in 4,178s
>
> Just thinking out loud,
>
> Sveinn
>
> Þann fim 19.sep 2013 08:17, skrifaði Craig Bradney:
>
>> Yes I agree there too. We also need longer term maintenance rather
>> thansomeone who just implements and leaves.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Craig
>>
>>
>>
>>  On 19 Sep 2013, at 10:11, "Staffan Melin (Oscillator)" <
>>> staffan.melin at oscillator.se> wrote:
>>>
>>> Sounds good! I'm for a new website and WP is an ok choice by me.
>>>
>>> But I don't like to introduce more tech like the Gumby framework, what
>>> are the reasons for this? Thinking about maintanance and the future
>>> makes me want to keep things simple.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> Staffan
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:04 AM, Dirk Meerkotter
>>> <design at bigissue.org.za> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi
>>>>
>>>> I feel it might be nice to have a new, fresh Scribus website.
>>>> Is there anyone in charge of this? If not, I offer to design a new
>>>> fresh,
>>>> clean and simple website.
>>>> It would be a Wordpress system - with Gumby framework - and one can
>>>> easily
>>>> integrate a Forum and wiki.
>>>> It really is time.
>>>>
>>>> Any thoughts on this?
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Staffan Melin
>>> Oscillator - ord bild form
>>> Kryssdäcket 1
>>> SE-413 27 GÖTEBORG
>>> SVERIGE/SWEDEN
>>> www.oscillator.se
>>> staffan.melin at oscillator.se
>>> +46 (0)70-4876 250
>>>
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