Synopses & Reviews
As a web designer, you have tough choices to make when it comes to weighing aesthetics and performance. Content, layout, images, and interactivity are necessary components to engage your audience, but each have an enormous impact on page load time.
This practical book helps you approach a new project with page speed in mind, and shows you how to test and benchmark which design choices are most important. Youll also learn how to design semantic HTML and CSS that are easily repurposed and edited later, saving not just page load time but also your own time during development.
Written by Etsy's performance engineering manager, this book covers:
- Why designing for performance is imperative
- The basics of page speed: requests and how browsers render content
- Optimizing images, HTML and CSS for performance
- Implementing responsive web design with an eye on performance
- Tools for measuring and iterating on your design choices and their performance
If you have Adobe Photoshop experience and basic HTML and CSS skills, this book will help you learn how to design for performance.
Synopsis
As a web designer, you encounter tough choices when it comes to weighing aesthetics and performance. Good content, layout, images, and interactivity are essential for engaging your audience, and each of these elements have an enormous impact on page load time and the end-user experience. In this practical book, Lara Hogan helps you approach projects with page speed in mind, showing you how to test and benchmark which design choices are most critical.
To get started, all you need are basic HTML and CSS skills and Photoshop experience.
Topics include:
- The impact of page load time on your site, brand, and users
- Page speed basics: how browsers retrieve and render content
- Best practices for optimizing and loading images
- How to clean up HTML and CSS, and optimize web fonts
- Mobile-first design with performance goals by breakpoint
- Using tools to measure performance as your site evolves
- Methods for shaping an organizations performance culture
About the Author
Lara Callender Hogan is the Senior Engineering Manager of Performance at Etsy and the author of Designing for Performance. She champions performance as a part of the overall user experience, striking a balance between aesthetics and speed, and building performance into company culture.
Table of Contents
; Praise for Designing for Performance; Foreword by Steve Souders; Foreword by Randy J. Hunt; Preface; How This Book Is Organized; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Performance Is User Experience; 1.1 Impact on Your Brand; 1.2 Impact on Mobile Users; 1.3 Designers' Impact on Performance; Chapter 2: The Basics of Page Speed; 2.1 How Browsers Render Content; 2.2 Page Weight; 2.3 Perceived Performance; 2.4 Other Impacts on Page Speed; Chapter 3: Optimizing Images; 3.1 Choosing an Image Format; 3.2 Replacing Image Requests; 3.3 Image Planning and Iterating; Chapter 4: Optimizing Markup and Styles; 4.1 Cleaning Your HTML; 4.2 Cleaning Your CSS; 4.3 Optimizing Web Fonts; 4.4 Creating Repurposable Markup; 4.5 Additional Markup Considerations; Chapter 5: Responsive Web Design; 5.1 Deliberately Loading Content; 5.2 Approaches; Chapter 6: Measuring and Iterating on Performance; 6.1 Browser Tools; 6.2 Synthetic Testing; 6.3 Real User Monitoring; 6.4 Changes over Time; Chapter 7: Weighing Aesthetics and Performance; 7.1 Finding the Balance; 7.2 Make Performance Part of Your Workflow; 7.3 Approach New Designs with a Performance Budget; 7.4 Experiment on Designs with Performance in Mind; Chapter 8: Changing Culture at Your Organization; 8.1 Performance Cops and Janitors; 8.2 Upward Management; 8.3 Working with Other Designers and Developers; About the Author; Designing for Performance; Colophon;