If you don’t know yet, I’m one of the tech guys of WhenInManila.com. We’re the ones that make sure the site runs smoothly and not crash. If you’re an avid reader of our site, you might have noticed that the site’s look changed last April.
From this
To this
We value the experience of our readers that’s why we changed the fonts, added spacing on the content, and made it more mobile friendly. We’ve seen that most of you read our articles on smartphones and we tried Facebook Instant Article to make our content available to you faster.
Yeah! If you see the thunderbolt, the article should load up faster.
It was cool but we believe that we can still make our mobile site faster so that more of our articles can be available to you. That’s why we attended the Form Function & Class 7 Master Class to jack up WhenInManila.com’s performance.
Form Function Class 7 is an event brought to us by the Philippine Web Designers Organization (PWDO). It was a 2-day event from October 22-23. It was held at Hive Hotel in Quezon City.
We attended the 2nd day for the Master Class. The Master Class is all about front-end performance and optimization. The one who taught us some tips and tricks was Holger Bartel.
Holger is a web design and front-end developer based in Hong Kong. He’s been designing and developing web sites in the fairly early days of the web so he really knows his stuff. He now spends his time advising how to design and develop responsive and mobile websites with a focus on performance and high standards. For short, he likes stuff that just works well.
The goal of the master class is pretty straightforward:
Why do we need to talk about performance? Because aside from reading good content on WIM, users expect it to load fast so they can read it. Users expect about 2-3 seconds for a site to load, if it takes more than that, they’ll probably abandon the page. Well, considering our current Internet speeds here in the Philippines, I’m quite thankful that most of the readers are patient (really, thank you!).
So really, faster is better.
Taking notes like a good software engineer would
We learned a lot of stuff in the Master Class. We learned how to do planning to make performance better by using tools to calculate page load time, analyzing the network, and creating a performance budget. These things opened up a lot of possibilities on how we can improve the site.
A lot of dev tools were introduced to us as well. We currently use GTMetrix and Google Analytics to help us improve WIM. Thanks to the Master Class, new tools and approaches were made known to us like Network Throttling, Network Link Conditioner, Page Load Film Strip, Timelines, etc.
We also did an exercise to apply the things we learned by testing some sites and coming up of ways to improve their performance.
We really learned a lot from this and writing an article is not just enough to convey all of them. Don’t miss out on the next Form Function & Class! Read it first on a faster WhenInManila.com next time!
Form Function & Class 7
Website: https://formfunctionclass.com/
Philippine Web Designers Organization: https://www.pwdo.org/
PWDO FB: https://www.facebook.com/webdesigners.org.ph/
