It's a nice clean, well-organized site.

A few things to take a look at -

• Clean up your meta tags - you have 3 charset declarations, 2 for utf-8, 1 for ISO-8859-1
• On the Bible Institute page, it tells the reader to check the web site for more information - they're already there.

I had to click on the messages twice for them to play (I'm using Firefox 3 on Ubuntu/Linux). I don't need to do that here on G&G. The audio quality could definitely be improved for better listening experience.

I'm also a fan of reducing the number of css and js files for sites - currently you have 8 css files and 5 js files loading on the main page, slowing down the page load and not all of them are needed on every page. The audio player is loading on the main page, yet there are no players on the page.

Keep up the good work!

Steve, thanks for the feedback.

If you are familiar with Drupal: regarding the meta tags, CSS, and JS, doesn't Drupal load these automatically? How do I control that?

Thanks!
Tom

Well, I can honestly say I've installed Drupal. How it loads meta tags, css and js is not within my realm of knowledge.

As I examine the page info here at G&G, I see that it presents the charset meta tag twice, with different character sets. Not an ideal situation, but not the end of the world. Perhaps one of the Drupal officianados can shed some light on this. Same for the css and js situation. In XOOPS and ImpressCMS, the core only loads 1 css file, the rest are loaded by the theme, so the theme designer influences the performance of the site quite a bit, in this respect. Some modules do have specific css files, but they only get loaded when that module is being viewed, not on every other page.

Drupal will consolidate CSS files and, I'm pretty sure, JavaScript files into a single file. This greatly improves load time.

I routinely turn off (and sometimes forget to turn on) CSS consolidation when I'm tweaking the CSS since the consolidated file is one line long and has spaces removed--just a little hard to edit.

Curt

I have seen the CSS consolidation option but never played with it. Does it really improve the load time that much? I figure the big picture is how many bytes are being downloaded... does consolidating the CSS and JS files really reduce the weight of the page?

Tom

CSS consolidation can make a big difference is site performance.

First, perhaps least significant of the two ways, is the elimination of white space in the files. Simply put, fewer bytes means less transmission time. While certainly an improvement, this improvement may not be noticeable.

Second, and more significant, is the reduction in the number of files processed. After the HTML is delivered to the browser, the browser has to make a request back to the server for each file. There's a lot of overhead for a file transfer and the smaller the file (some CSS files may be only a few hundred bytes) the more significant this overhead is. So, for a small file the overhead (the data and time that is spent requesting and retrieving the file) can easily exceed the time necessary to transfer the actual data. Within reason, the overhead for a small file is the same as the overhead for a large file. So, if you have 8 CSS files and you consolidate them into 1 you've just reduced the overhead by 88% AND decreased the necessary bandwidth.

The same kind of savings are possible for JS files.

Curt

Curt, I turned on some of the performance tweaks for our production site and I think I see a slight performance increase. We have a dev site where we do theme development and I'll keep the CSS consolidation off. I guess when you make a CSS change and push it out, you have to turn off the consolidation on prod, push the CSS file, and then turn it back on? Is that how you do it?

I also got rid of one redundant meta Content-Type tag. I had both "print $head" (which outputs meta tags) and another tag in my theme. Curious, though: it looks like the $head variable outputs two Content-Type tags. I wonder why that is.

Tom