the zaps website ;)

[AcidRaZor]

Graphically:

1. The Website is too cluttered. Difficult to navigate.

2. There is more of an emphasis on News rather than products. The Products tab/menu looks like an afterthought, that and took me a while to find

3. The old design was outdated for sure- but easier to use.

4. The product listings are not user friendly - it needs to be more "clean". This can be attributed to the colour scheme of the website and the way it is listed due to integration of the e-zine format.

Technically:

1. As stated before- image and website usage is too heavy.

2. The lightbox/JQuery effect is a bit slow.


That said - I will still be ordering from them due to their prices and hopefully stock availability. From my experience E-Zine & E-Commerce generally doesn't gel together, thou it can work.

With regards to the Gamezine integration- Zaps has become more of a gaming-centric website, which I believe they wanted.

Thou is it relevant to the majority of their customers?
Just work on the Useability of the website, cos Zaps do have great prices.
Perhaps a left side menu thats easier to notice?

The images loaded are the full sized images and not just thumbnails... this is one of the major hogs on load time too

[Tinav]

Awesome thanks Acid

[Pr⊕phet]

/gets PageSpeed + YSlow

[AcidRaZor]

/gets PageSpeed + YSlow

Yea it's awesome, I usually save a lot just by minifying my JS and my CSS. Sometimes the designer also uses styles and includes unused ones while he designed the stuff reducing that file size considerably. Just wish there was a way to get Page Speed to show you a file without the styles, would make editing one to exclude them much easier

[Tinav]

Thanks again for the help guys I have passed your comments onto the web guys.

[AcidRaZor]

Thanks again for the help guys I have passed your comments onto the web guys.

You should maybe think of getting different web guys...

[stix]

// To many CSS files
// To many JS files

And get them to turn on permalinks - will help with SEO

[stix]

You should maybe think of getting different web guys...

i lol'd

[Pr⊕phet]

...stix. your contribution is legendary

[Pr⊕phet]

i wonder if the devs had managed to overhaul it from bloat to float.

[AcidRaZor]

Not sure haven't checked again, all I can say is it should literally take them an hour to do.

They just need to go through all the plugins they installed on wordpress, make a concise list of what CSS and JS is needed. Defer the JS not needed to the footer page and the essential ones (which is really just 1 file) to the header.

Then take out the code in the plugins that loads these js/css files.

Sure it's a manual job if you want to update the plugins each time to make sure they don't load crap in your pages. But like I said... different web guys.

Personally, instead of using only that flickr plugin which loads the entire image into a small thumbnail (which is where most your bandwidth dissappears to)... and to cater for the poor saps who have LOCAL ONLY bandwidth (seeing as it's a locally hosted website too). I'd write a small cURL command (or whatever) to get the image from flickr, cache it on my website, RESIZE the thing to thumbnail and THEN display it...

ANYWAY. My ass is sore from this stupid ****ing chair I'm sitting on and I have ton of work to do today. At least it's not 42 like yesterday. Cloudy with a chance of cool wind = nice

[Pr⊕phet]

ANYWAY. My ass is sore from this stupid ****ing chair I'm sitting on and I have ton of work to do today. At least it's not 42 like yesterday. Cloudy with a chance of cool wind = nice

tell me about it and one can only drink so much coffee.

[zagame]

O/T

thanks for the reference to YSlow, I used it today on my joomla website and got a shock

but after spending 4 hours compressing .css, image and js files, adding Expires headers etc. I have it to a Grade C (score 73)

Now to combine the fusking stylesheets and make imagesprites ( tommorow) I hope to improve to a B , there is nothing that I can do about the -
Grade F on Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) so that will have to fail

some helpfull tips and tools I found in my Joomla optimising mission of the day

in the .htaccess file add the following code sorts out the Expires Headers problem

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset ETag
Header unset Last-Modified
</IfModule>
FileETag None
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|gz|JPG|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header unset Cache-control
Header set Expires "Mon, 13 Dec 2010 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>

in Joomla turn on cache and also for all modules installed

http://jscompress.com/ - compress all jscript
http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor/ - compress all .css

for image sprites made easy visit http://spriteme.org/ and follow instructions.

hope this turns out useful to somebody

[AcidRaZor]

Thanks for the contribution zagame!

[zagame]

Thanks for the contribution zagame!

np

since the switch from static html to first mambo and now joomla I am happy to assist in joomla queries

add a .co.za to my nick to test the site yourself ( if interested)

off to combine .css files and since joomla uses a crazy amount it should take awhile