Apollo new portal quick review

I had this wonderfull chance to test www.apollo.lv upcomming portal version. In this quick review I’ll start with some imperfections, and finish with some good words afterwards.

  • Probably the most notable and most visible drawback is that portal design lacks flexibility. I really like some competitor portals, mainly because their designs are fluid and takes advantage of higher screen resolutions. This is how new portal design looks at Full High Definition resolution.
  • The code is not W3C valid. Although this is not extremely important, it usually shows, that coder cares about the code he writes, and is able to follow standards.
  • I’ve tested portal loading performance for several times, and average complete site loading time was 10.5 seconds. So that could be faster. Latter site surfing performance is greatly improved when all of the files are loaded into browser cache, but still there are things to improve.
  • One thing is that all JavaScript files that are loaded from one domain should be packed in one file, thus extremely decreasing loading time, because major vast of time would be no more spent for just sending useless GET requests.

As you can see in these statistics, now JavaScript code is splited in multiple files:

  1. 10 js from static.apollo.lv
  2. 6 js files from apollolv.adocean.pl
  3. 6 js files from apollo.lv

  • Same holds true for *.css files
  • One last, similar technique to increase design loading speed is what’s called css spriting. It means, that all visual elements, such as borders, corners, backgrounds and buttons are stored into one *.jpg or *.gif file, and then using CSS, positioned accordingly. This technique has two major advantages. First – less files means faster loading. Second, jpg/gif compression is far more effective, because the same Huffman encoding table can be used for all images.

Here are a few positive things.

  • It was a positive surprise that Apollo is using HTTP compression. Although this is not a new feature in upcoming portal version, it is still worth to point out. I wish everybody used it.
  • Twitter account for Apollo is very cool. It shows that portal technical creators are following “web fashion”

That would be about it. I will certainly keep an eye to this portal evolution.

Good luck!

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