William Paterson University – Episode #175
Site Scores:
| Site | Visual | Information | Code | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| William Paterson University | 68 | 73 | 55 | (196/300) 65% D |
Today’s Tip:
Your website visitors don’t have a voice, you have to be their voice. Make sure you always have them in mind. This is the first step to becoming a web rockstar. Knowing your end user and advocating for their needs. Don’t just sit back and let administration take control of your site, the visitor is the reason the site exists, they are in control.
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Tags: episode
July 19th, 2010 at 11:44 am
Out of curiosity, why is it any worse to rely on Google’s CDN for AJAX libraries than it is to rely on Google for Analytics script? For sites that utilize Google Analytics, I don’t see any reason not to utilize the Google Hosted AJAX API while you’re at it. You’re already going to be waiting on Google’s servers, anyway.
July 21st, 2010 at 7:00 am
Curtiss,
Very true, but I guess one difference is if you are using Google new Analytics code it is non blocking. It doesn’t interfere with the page load at all and can even track visits before the full page has loaded.
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-launches-asynchronous.html
I just prefer to keep the number of dependencies down incase the site starts acting up there is less to debug.
July 22nd, 2010 at 10:33 am
Completely understood. I felt that way for a long time, too. It used to be especially annoying with Analytics a few years ago, as that seemed to drag our page load to a halt for 1 or 2 seconds on some occasions. Google’s servers seem to have gotten a great deal faster and more reliable for this sort of thing, though.
Once we switched to jQuery (which is pretty compact considering all of the power and features it adds, but still adds a good bit of weight to the page), I personally decided that the potential benefits of having the library already cached outweighed the potential cons (especially since I try really hard to make sure all of our pages work properly without javascript, so it doesn’t kill anything if the javascript fails for some reason).
I guess a lot of it has to do with personal preference, amount of traffic (judging by your Analytics posts on the Wayne State blog, it looks like you guys get 5 to 10 times the amount of traffic we get) and server resources.