Lou Mintzer

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December 15 2009 7 Steps To Make Your Website Fast
The speed of your website is important because people's time is important. Nobody wants to sit around and wait for your website to load! In fact, page speed and page abandonment have a direct relationship. The 7 step program below is a set of guiding principles that outline a course of action to make your website load faster.

1. Admit it, your website is slower than your competition's website! What, you need proof? Go to WebPageTest and make a visual comparison video to assess your page speed against your competitor's page speed. Here is a classic example of Facebook vs. MySpace, who do you think wins?

2. Yeah, you have a problem. No worries, it can be fixed. Exactly what you need to do to make your website faster has already been documented. Check out Google's Web Performance Best Practices or Yahoo's Performance Rules and believe.

3. Now you must decide that making your website load faster will improve your business! It will improve your traffic, retain your visitors and boost your clicks. The evidence speaks for itself. Do your homework and check out some of the presenter presentations from Velocity 2009. Speed matters and its not just lip service.

4. You're in, time to get started. First step, you must take fearless inventory of your website's performance issues. If you use Firefox as a browser, you can install Firebug and then use YSlow or Page Speed to grade the performance of your website and generate a list of things that you can fix. Use WebPageTest to view a performance waterfall generated by Internet Explorer.

5. You are now completely aware of the exact nature your performance wrongs. Now you need to come up with a plan to methodically fix each defect. Fortunately, most performance improvement tasks are small and lend themselves nicely to being tracked via a ticketing system like Jira or project management software like Basecamp.

6. Dole out the work. If you are a web designer, time to roll up your sleeves. If you have a team of designers and developers, make sure you clearly prioritize the optimization work in relation to new development. Sow the seeds of speed and reap the benefits!

7. Finally, now that you've had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, it is your duty to carry this message onward. You must instill the Web Performance Best Practices into all of your future website development projects. As you'll learn, its faster and more efficient to have your development team code it right the first time. Good luck!
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December 11 2009 So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

It has been an exciting ride but my time at AOL has come to an end. I spent six years at AOL and I will look back upon those years with fond memories. At AOL I worked with many smart, driven people and I wish them all the best. Under Tim Armstrong’s leadership, AOL is transforming itself into a low-cost content machine and if online ad rates come back, it might just work.

At AOL, I had the opportunity to work on a ton of interesting projects and build a wide array of websites. One of the very first projects that I helped build was AOL Call Alert and I just chuckled when I realized that it actually still exists! Recently, my focus has been on building in-house performance tools to measure, analyze and improve the speed and availability of AOL websites like AOL, TMZ, Fanhouse, Engadget and Politics Daily.

I learned many things at AOL, including the realization that I enjoy conceiving, designing and building websites. Now that I’m a free agent, I’m excited to apply everything that I have learned about building world-class websites to new opportunities. Building and growing a personal blog is something that I finally have time to do.

The focus of this blog will be about building websites, making them faster and getting people to visit them. I hope you’ll come back to read more.

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December 05 2009 ExpressionEngine 2.0
Congrats to Ellis Labs for launching a huge upgrade to ExpressionEngine. The new version is a robust publishing system and an impressive leap forward. Once you get the hang of setting up channels and templates, publishing dynamic content becomes a breeze.

Built on CodeIgniter, my favorite PHP framework, ExpressionEngine 2.0 is bound to do great things. With its support for add-on modules, plugins and extensions, I see the basis for a strong developer ecosystem. As I tweak, customize and optimize my installation I will continue to post my findings.
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