How would you feel when you visit a website looking for information and it says – Loading – Please wait 10%, 50%…? Annoying? In fact nothing is more annoying for a website visitor than waiting for a 100K graphic to load when it actually has to be 10K. Huge flashy graphics and multimedia might make your website look nicer, but helps no way for a time savvy reader who comes to avail information on your site. In turn your visitor would click off immediately without looking at what you have to offer, although this is not your intention.

It is of course imperative to have a practically fast loading website so that your visitors are not left in a loop of waiting. Also remember that search engine algorithms do take your website loading time into consideration when pushing your ranking. Most likely, your visitors will come to your site for reading interesting and valuable content or to make a purchase, so why not make their visit enjoyable? Learn how to create a fast loading website with these 10 effective tips:

10 Effective Tips for a Fast-Loading Website

About Images and Graphics – We all know minimizing the usage of images can be a good deal for a fast-loading website, but what if it is not possible? Well, when designing templates, logos, buttons, and other necessary elements in Illustrator make sure they are created as vector images. As these images are big in size, turn them from CMYK to RGB and also ensure you decrease it to exact size that is required by your site. Remember resizing needs to be done only in Illustrator or Photoshop for quick loading. Make use of an excellent tool called GifBot that helps you shrinking your graphics right on a webpage quickly.

Make Most Out of CSS – CSS is a revolutionary tool for fast-loading website, actually many developers these days prefers designing the whole website using CSS. Just because it is a simple HTML code, it has an advantage of loading fast. However, working on CSS requires creativity, so make sure you try out different styles in CSS. Because CSS styles are in HTML, you would further save time and have the same unique effects you’re behind.

Avoid “So-Called” Creative Stuffs – How about adding as flash movie or a dancing object to the website to impress visitors? I’m sorry but it a bad idea, your readers would only feel assaulted with these so-called creative stuffs. Using plain Html is best as too many fancy things that impress you might bog down the loading time and will cause visual overload to your visitor. It is best to make minimal usage of such objects or even better to avoid it.

Respect Your Site Content – Placing content wherever possible will leave your reader confused and lost. Your content is valuable and the most important element of the site, so it is ok if you have more to share, but it is bad to stuff them all at one place. Basically, long content pages will take long time to load. Hence, break them into different relative sections so that the size is minimized for each page. Give some room for your reader to breathe and enjoy surfing.

Know Your Backgrounds and Buttons – Using background images will only say your website is “amateur”, because no professional site make use of background images that distract the reader. The main problem is it will take longer time to load than the usual. The same holds true in case the site has end-number of buttons. Best is to optimize your button and background in Photoshop, if the loading time really matters to you. Use appropriate web colors for background and roll over buttons to help saving loading time.

Turn Your Images Into Tables – These days’ tables can be an excellent alternative to graphics and images. It is a must to learn to make use of tables offered by the web design program as it will reduce the load time of site. You can definitely give an artistic feel just by making use of table with background color and cool text. Remember, the more you dig down HTML to create a website, the faster you will have your website load.

Chuck Down Animated Gifs – We have increasingly saw that a simple looking website gain more popularity than animated one. Why use Animated Gifs when we know that it can slow down the loading time? There might be lot of hype about animated gifs on site, but can give horrifying results when visitors come to you. You want your visitors to come and come again, so do it with simple and fast loading website. By all means attractive design and good content can drive traffic.

Useless and Repeated Pages – Do you need them? If not, then minimize your web pages with required information and make sure you don’t duplicate them. This is very important for saving time on site navigation. Point-to-Point information is always appreciated by people. We all love manageable sites, which helps easy navigation without getting bogged down. So ensure you take away all your useless and repeated pages.

Love HTML – If you looking to save time on loading then take care you design most of your site in HTML. There is always room for creativity and the best creativity is used when designing website with HTLM code. It will not only save time, but it is relatively easy to deal with. Make use of tables, colors, CSS styles, different fonts to create it. Also know that your website should be completely error free.

Keep Your Eye Open – So your site is ready, and the work is over? No, not really, you need to keep an eye open on your website and observe the pages often. Checking often will help you locate bugs (if any) and will improve it overall. Fix the error immediately if you come across any for over all good performance!

Header is quite sensitive area of any layout as it contains your brand identity i.e your logo. It perfectly described the motive of the website. In Thesis wordpress theme people often forget to change their logo and live with traditional default layouts. In this tutorial we would like to drag your attention on the thesis header and logo customization.

Before going further on thesis customization we should know about the custom keys. All the thesis customization is carried with the help of files located in custom folders. Mainly there are two files:

1. custom.css
2. custom_functions.php

How to change the thesis header with your own logo

If you want to change your logo then you should use the following style sheet in your custom.css file. Copy and paste this code in your custom.css file and upload your logo image in custom/images folder of the thesis theme.

.custom #header #logo a { display: block; height: 80px; width: 410px; background: url(images/header.png) no-repeat; outline: none; }
.custom #header #logo, .custom #header #tagline { text-indent: -9999px; }
.custom #header #tagline { height: 0; } .custom #header { padding: 0; }
.custom #header {border-bottom:none;background-color : transparent; }
.custom #header_area .page {padding-top:0;}
.custom #header {height:80px;/*background: #333 url('images/bg-body.png') no-repeat; background-position:bottom right; border-bottom:none;}

Few properties of the logo used in above style

• height: –px– Height of your logo (you should describe your own logo height here).
• width: –px – Width of your logo (you should describe your own logo width here).
• background: – Logo url (you should describe your own logo url path here).

How to change the header background

In the above described styles( for changing logo) we already used a header background to matched it with the layout. Here is an example:

.custom #header {height:80px; background: url('images/bg-header.png') no-repeat; background-position:bottom right; border-bottom:none;}

Points to be noted:

1. Don’t forget to upload the images in custom/images. In hurry we upload the images in the root images folder and face the problems.
2. Don’t try to edit another style sheet apart from custom.css. In case you are a css expert you can carry the changes but you need to change them again at the time of thesis upgrade. So its better to change the css only from custom.css.

Lot more thesis tutorials are coming soon in this series. Do drop in comments for any queries and suggestions.

Update
You can easily add the texts in the thesis header as its very easy to customize the thesis header.
Just add any hook for example

function honey_header(){
?>
< center >< h1 style="text-align:center;" >{ Your Title  }< /h1 >< /center >

add_action('thesis_hook_header','honey_header');

Here

< h1 style="text-align:center;" >{ Your Title  }< /h1 >

is responsible for the style of the text heading on header.

In order for better performance and usability we often use JavaScipt libraries ,ajax forms , CSS based menus and so many things that provides a good user interface and helps developers to write code in order to develop products more quickly and efficiently.

Here is the list for 10 best goodies for the web developers and designers:

1. AJAXload

   is a free tool for engendering the little twirling icons that most of the designers use for AJAX request calls. You can choose for 35 different designs, all which customizable colors and the options of transparent backgrounds.

2. Radio Button and Check Box Replacement

   This jQuery tool substitutes radio buttons and check boxes with a more invoking presentation.

3. FavIcon Generator (Dynamic Drive)

   This tool provided by the Dynamic Drive and it has one of the best tools out there for creating favicon’s, the little icons for web pages in your browser. You can give it any GIF, JPG, PNG or BMP file and it will covert it into a 16×16 icon file. You can also merge the larger 32×32 and 48×48 into the file as well so that it becomes the perfect desktop icon.Do you know that favicon is quite important decoration of website and development companies like toronto web development never forget to put it.Though it takes very less time but you should always keep in mind to embellish your website address bar with a favicon.

4. Simple jQuery Form Validation

   Its it a sort of jQuery form which shows live form-input validators both server-side and browser-side.

5. Stripe Generator

   Repeating strips are very Web 2.0 but are very difficult to get right if you draw them from raw. This is where the stripe generator comes in. You can set lots of different options including thickness, color and orientation to get the perfect stripes for your design.

6. Pagination

   Create navigational elements: when you have a large number of items, you can group them into pages and present navigational elements that allow users to move from one page to another.

7. jQuery AJAX Contact Form

   Its a promiscuous way to make a jQuery AJAX contact form with a “honeypot” to foil email bots, load success and error messages dynamically without leaving the page and provide descriptively error logs messages detailing why submitted values have failed validation.

8. CSS Sprite Generator

   CSS sprites are really fiddly to make, but this excellant website takes out all the hassle. Give them a ZIP file of your icons fiddle about with teh spacing, and it will create the perfect image.CSS Sprites2 This tutorial demonstrates how to implement inline CSS Sprites2 using jQuery.

9. PatternCooler

   With the help of pattern cooler you can easily create background patterns for things like twitter using this simple tool.

10. Text Size Slider

    This tutorial explains how to use a slider to control the text size of an article on a page. This lets the user control exactly the size that suits them, and is also a pretty impressive feature to have on a site.

Their are many more advance technologies used by web developers and companies like toronto web development in their development work for objectively attending a better products.