Designing for Performance
Douban
Weighing Aesthetics and Speed
Lara Callender Hogan
Overview
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 organization’s performance culture
contents
Chapter 1 Performance Is User Experience
Impact on Your Brand
Impact on Mobile Users
Designers’ Impact on Performance
Chapter 2 The Basics of Page Speed
How Browsers Render Content
Page Weight
Perceived Performance
Other Impacts on Page Speed
Chapter 3 Optimizing Images
Choosing an Image Format
Replacing Image Requests
Image Planning and Iterating
Chapter 4 Optimizing Markup and Styles
Cleaning Your HTML
Cleaning Your CSS
Optimizing Web Fonts
Creating Repurposable Markup
Additional Markup Considerations
Chapter 5 Responsive Web Design
Deliberately Loading Content
Approaches
Chapter 6 Measuring and Iterating on Performance
Browser Tools
Synthetic Testing
Real User Monitoring
Changes over Time
Chapter 7 Weighing Aesthetics and Performance
Finding the Balance
Make Performance Part of Your Workflow
Approach New Designs with a Performance Budget
Experiment on Designs with Performance in Mind
Chapter 8 Changing Culture at Your Organization
Performance Cops and Janitors
Upward Management
Working with Other Designers and Developers
Appendix About the Author
Appendix Designing for Performance
Colophon