ProjectX Blog

This post is Part of a web performance audit of New Zealand homepages. (Part II looks at Government homepages.)

I’ve compiled a list called the New Zealand homepage hall of shame. The list details the download efficiency of the top 75 websites in New Zealand. The survey was conducted using the YSlow tool over the top 75 New Zealand websites from Rankr.

In the results, I’ve included the YSlow ranking, total size of the webpage (this includes all html, css, flash, javascript, images etc) in Kilobytes, the number of external javascpript and CSS files and the time it would take to load on a 56k Modem (@ 6k/s).

The Highlights lowlights of the survey:

• The average size of homepages was 304.9K. UPDATE: Global webpage Average is 312K
• 52% of websites use NO WEB COMPRESSION
• The largest pages were over 1000K
• Several of the top 20 sites in New Zealand were the biggest offenders
• Advertising javascript is not being compressed
• Some sites have dozens of Javascript and CSS files, worst offender had 35 javascript files
  

A number of web companies and web developers should be holding their heads in shame – the results are not flattering. We need to better building smart – download friendly webpages not slow loading monsters ! You can either fix it yourself or get some experts!

So without further a due here are the summary tables:

Top 10 worst homepages according to Yslow ranking

Top 10 best homepages according to Yslow ranking

Top 10 largest homepages in Kilobytes

Top 10 smallest homepages in Kilobytes

Here is the complete data for the top 75 New Zealand websites homepages. I have compiled the list from using YSlow to analyse the pages and recording everything. The data is sorted by worst Yslow ranking. (The test was completed 13th of May 2008 between 8-10pm)

I been working on a mini audit of the top 75 New Zealand websites. I took the top 75 NZ websites from Rankr and using YSlow compiled the data last night.

I discovered that …

The Average homepage size in NZ is 304.9K !

That will take almost 51 seconds to load on a modem.

The size is the total downloaded size of all the total html, css, images, js, flash etc. Compressed files are recorded at their compressed size.

Even more scary is 52% of the top NZ website are not using any web compression, 37.3% are using some compression and 10.7% are fully compressed.

We can’t complain about dial up loading speed if our homepages are over 300K!

I’ll be posting the NZ homepages of shame, very shortly.

UPDATE: Global average pagesize is 312K

I’ve just been reviewing some of the recent materials by Steve Souders (previously of Yahoo, now at Google) on speeding up your javascript. He has powerpoint slides (from Web expo 2.0) on how you can load scripts in parallel and how to structure the loading of your scripts.

The powerpoint is a must for any web developer who wants to ensure their website can deliver high performance.

He reminds us that 91% of the time spent waiting for a webpage to render is spent on the the frontend. The frontend covers loading all of the CSS, javascript and images loading. The other 9% covers the request to the server and loading the base html!

This highlights the some focus on the frontend can make a huge difference in speeding up webpages.

Other resources:

• Best practices for web performance
• YSlow
• IBM page detailer to look at a page is loading.
• Youtube webcast part 1 and oreilly webcast part 2
  
• Cuzillion – Steve’s opensource tool to demonstrate how different page components affect page loading

I attended the Spatial barcamp and GoVis conference last week and here are my thoughts.

I thought the conference was great way for the industry to get together and network. It was nice to see some interesting talks from the speakers on how GIS was integrated into enterprise solutions

Open source good, Open standards better

The New Zealand Geospatial Office is promoting the use of open source tools (mapserver, mapguide etc) and open standards around government agencies. Its great to see more open source being promoted.

The use of open standards, KML, WFS, WMS etc will be a good way for people to share data. As a industry we already have a lot of proprietary formats, we need to promote open standards to enable better interaction between organisations.

I would offer a word of caution, using open source tools (just like anything else) is not going to be a magic bullet solution. You need to select the right tool for the job.

At ProjectX, we used a number of open source and propriety tools to make our maps. We’ve switched from mapserver to Manifold and now back to mapserver because the quality of the generated imagery wasn’t good enough for us.

Innovation under the surface

It was great to some innovations and ideas that going on out there. Big things like Aerial capture via microlight and dynamic object tracking systems, and smaller things like Napier City council making more of it core data available via open source tools.

It made me think, that as an industry (and companies in NZ) we don’t market our ideas very well. Even at ProjectX, we have a lot of things we built for clients or internally that is innovative and leading edge that never sees the light of day.

To that end, I’m working with Gavin from gis.org.nz to create a news portal for GIS / Geo-spatial news in New Zealand. We’re looking at creating a news system for companies to talk about new products, ideas and issues in the our space. We’re in the process of setting it up properly now, so stay tuned.

Partnerships

It was refreshing to see that all the GIS departments in the Auckland region were working together. Personally I don’t think there are enough partnerships between players. There is a lot of innovation happening in NZ, and we need to work together to take on the world!

I’ve been asked to be the panel for  the latest UP event – a tale of four  cities at SYN bar tomorrow night.

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A recent article in Time said that New York, London and Hong Kong were three hub cities of the world. These cities foster innovation, creativity, and set global trends, and generally what happens there affects the rest of the world. Unlimited Potential think the Wellington should be added to the list as the new innovative ‘southern hemisphere hub’, and on May 6th we’ll tell you why.

I’m a big believer in Wellington and a big supporter of Silicon Welly and Summer of Code which are doing their bit at making Wellington an international technology destination

And there’s lots of pizza and beer  – Make sure you RSVP on the website.

Earlier this week, changes to the Alexa ranking system (owned by Amazon) have caused a big changes in the Rankr top 100 sites of NZ.

The big news is that TradeMe has dropped from 2 most popular site (behind) google to 4th. Others in the top 100 have traded positions.

In comparison to real traffic figures, it seems to be re-adjusting itself to be inline to the relative positions of companies and their real traffic.

It will be interesting to see if this is the first of many changes from Alexa.

Google maps, ZoomIn maps and et are like the MP3 of the GIS world. It has made mapping and spatial visualisation available to everyone with a browser. Just as MP3 maybe not be good enough for audiophiles, google maps is not going to be powerful enough for a lot of serious GIS work. The simplicity of Google maps is going drive the consumption of GIS information into a new era.

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Spatial bar camp is being held in Wellington on the 1st of May. They are running a spatial mash-up competition in which they are asking companies or people mashing spatial data. More information at http://barcamp.org.nz/wellington-spatial-mash-2008-1-may-2008

ProjectX will be submitting 2-3 entries, showcasing our new visualisation engine.

We’ve just taken another looking at Google sitemaps for the first time in a long while. We’ve had mixed resulting using the sitemaps. Changes that we’ve made were taking weeks to come through. So with all the frustration at the way Google indexes our site, we decided to write a little program that parses our weblogs and looks at our crawler traffic. Its been incredibly useful to see what the google crawler is upto.

Here’s how it helped us, as we refine our SEO for our recent photos page, we got to see the effects to the crawler and on the site.

Our Google sitemap had this :

<url>
<loc>http://www.zoomin.co.nz/?recent/photos</loc>
<changefreq>hourly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>

And this was our traffic before the changes

2008-04-10 /?recent/photos MSN [65.55.209.80]
2008-04-10 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-10 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-09 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-08 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-08 /?recent/photos Yahoo [74.6.29.187]
2008-04-07 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.94]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Yahoo [74.6.29.187]
2008-04-05 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.94]
2008-04-05 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.99]

We changed the changefreq to always and it seems to have had an affect.

<url>
<loc>http://www.zoomin.co.nz/?recent/photos</loc>
<changefreq>always</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
Using the always change frequency tag denotes that a page is dynamic and changes all the time. Our photo page doesn’t change all the time, but it wasn’t getting indexed by google as often as the content has been changing.

The change had an effect within 24 hours of changing our sitemap.

Displaying 1-25 of 70
Date Place Crawler
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.58.157]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-11 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]

We’re currently thinking about making our seo tool opensource, as its really useful for medium sized sites to figure out what Google is upto.

Mobile development wizards Innaworks have just released alcheMo for iPhone .

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alcheMo for iPhone is designed for simultaneous Java ME and iPhone development. Initially targeted at game publishers, alcheMo for iPhone is fully automated and designed to instantly port a standard Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) mobile game to iPhone and iPod touch without the need for further manual adjustments.

Will be handy for those companies that are wanting to port their Java apps to iPhone.

Update: Article in ComputerWorld – Kiwi developer ports Java games to iPhone