Hello SM,
On 10 November 2015 at 16:06, S Moonesamy <sm+mu_at_elandsys.com> wrote:
> Hi Nadim,
> At 23:13 09-11-2015, Nadim Bundhoo wrote:
>
>> Sun (Sandeep), who I think is on this mailing list, was giving hints on
>> Facebook since last week that there shall be a new UI/UX [on <
>> http://lexpress.mu>lexpress.mu].
>>
>
> I found the new layout difficult to parse. I encountered a similar
> problem with defimedia.
Do you remember the several animated GIFs on webpages in the early 2000's ?
Every animations distracted us from viewing the one piece of information on
the page that was supposed to be the main "content."
On this new version of lexpress.mu, I feel the same. Which piece of info
should I focus on?
The size of the new lexpress page is twice that of the old version.
I do not have an idea on the size of the old version, but I did a test on
this new version. I found that the homepage weighs around 23MB. The website
is responsive, which means that on mobiles and tablets, dark matter are
added to the pages. By dark matter I mean that assets are downloaded though
not visible (most probably because of display:none in the CSS) [1].
The cost for 1GB of mobile data is Rs299 [2] or Rs 0.299 per MB of data. If
everytime I visit lexpress.mu on my mobile (with this 1GB data plan), I'll
have to pay Rs 6.877 (it may be slightly less, depending on the amount of
data downloaded).
Anyway, it is not encouraging at all to visit lexpress.mu on a mobile.
> I assume that the web developers spent time testing the layout on a tablet
> as that version looks better than the desktop version. I would give a few
> negative marks for fluidity.
I don't know about lexpress.mu's analytics, but having 2 different versions
of the website (desktop & mdot) would have been better, instead of one
responsive version. Imagine the bandwidth wasted when the website is
accessed on a mobile phone.
The website has also been designed to cater for IE7 and IE8. Say if 1% of
the traffic comes from surfers on IE7 & IE8 - which makes around 10000
surfers according to "News web sites traffic in Mauritius" [3], why do we
offer them a responsive website? Surfers on these browsers may still be on
Windows XP (perhaps government officials) with a slow computer. Why should
they have to download all the CSS & JS then?
Is lexpress faster than defimedia? I don't think so. I looked into this to
> figure out how the web site could be faster.
>
I am on MyT 10M [4]. Defimedia's homepage weighs around 14MB and loads in
around 20s whereas Lexpress.mu weighs around 23MB and loads in 37s. (number
of CSS & JS files, images/ads/videos/audio?)
Defimedia's page starts to render after 4.6s whereas Lexpress page starts
to render after 6.2s. (CSS & JS ordering?)
The browser makes 227 requests if I surf Defimedia's page for the first
time and 22 requests subsequently. 338 requests are made if I surf on
Lexpress homepage for the first time, and 163 requests subsequently.
(caching of assets?)
The only area where I could find L'express better than Defimedia is the
first-time-to-byte (i.e. time to wait for server to send first piece of
contents, usually the HTML). Lexpress.mu may be behind a cache server
(Varnish?) and Defimedia not.
Regards,
Nadim Attari
[1]
https://speakerdeck.com/grigs/performance-implications-of-responsive-design
(June 2012)
[2]
http://www.orange.mu/mobile/sites-4G.php
[3]
http://www.elandsys.com/~sm/news-web-traffic-mauritius.html
[4]
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4824952609 (Server in Dublin.
L'express hosting is in Dublin too)
Received on Thu Nov 12 2015 - 01:04:29 PST