OPTIMIZATION: Test your portal on Websiteoptimization.com

When building a portal, a site, a blog, a forum.... there are many factors to have in mind:

• Technology
• Design, Usability & User experience
• Good SEO Strategy
• Market Niche, ..or People interested in your contents
• .....
• .....
• and a good OPTIMIZATION of your site!!!.

How can you optimize your site??. There are many factors, but the most obvious are:

1. A proper size of the html code. It is recommended less than 50kb, ..normally this would not be the problem!!
2. Miniziming the number of items in your page (img, flash, css files, js files...). How much are recommended?? from 20 to 30.
3. Minimizing also the size of this items. Total size should be around 100kb.
4. Minify your css and js files (this will erase any useless whitespaces, carriage return....).
5. GZIP your code. This has to be allowed by your hosting provider.
6. Size of External Elements. You may have external elements in within your page, ..for the hosting server this can better sometimes (youtube videos, flicker images...), but for the guy surfing your web will be like elements in your page, so bare in mind point 2.
7. No broken links!!. No error 404. This will make the server one disk access to declare the error at the log which will mean slower transfer.
8. A good hosting provider!!. The speed your page is downloaded depends of all factors above as well as the speed of your provider!!.

Hmmmm, too many factors!!. why doesn't exist a tool which can help me??. There are many, for example a plugin for firefox which I love called YUI but I will speak about it another day..., for starting testing your site I recommend Websiteoptimization. Just enter your URL, and this tool will check most of the factors above about your site, ..and even more interesting it will tell you how optimized are your friend's portal so you will show them your portal is better than theirs!! :)

Try twitter and google starting pages, ..and check the differences....

And today the killers are at Radio freakZion!!!.