Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site recommends minimizing the number of HTTP requests during the delivery of a webpage because there is a significant amount of overhead during the HTTP request process for each file. Furthermore, CSS and Javascript file sizes can be “minified” by removing unnecessary characters, white space, comments, etc. The downside to combining files and minifying, though, is that it becomes very difficult to debug or maintain minified code. To get the best of both worlds, it is best practice to keep two copies of each file — a combined/minified version (for deployment) and a non-combined, readable version (for development). While this process would be labor-intensive with each build, we can implement a few simple tricks in Visual Studio to automate this process and achieve a faster end-user experience.

Step 1: Download CSSMin and JSMin

Read the rest of this entry » Compiling Multiple CSS and Javascript Files During Buildtime with CSSMin and JSMin in Visual Studio

TechBuyingGuide.com is a new website that is changing the way that consumers purchase computers online.

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While code optimization is a controversial topic, curiosity often gets the best of me and I want to know which method of doing something in VB.NET is more efficient.

Read the rest of this entry » Simple .NET Benchmarking

In an effort to garner web design inspiration, I frequently visit CSS galleries to increase my design vocabulary and see new, cutting-edge design trends. Often times, however, these websites are consistently making the same amateur design mistakes that shouldn’t ever be done by gallery-worthy web designs.

1. Thou shalt preload all CSS:hover images If you’re willing to put the time into changing an image on :hover, isn’t it worth your time to do it right? Often, users won’t even notice your :hover efforts because it’ll take too long to load a new image on-demand. To read more about preloading background images, check out Please preload your CSS images

Read the rest of this entry » Ten Commandments of Exceptional Web Design

I recently switched from Apache/Linux to IIS/Windows in order to develop ASP.NET applications on my shared web host (ixwebhosting.com). Unfortunately, IIS6 doesn’t support WordPress permalinks because it doesn’t have the ability to use mod_rewrite unless you install a third-party ISAPI filter. Because I’m on a shared hosting plan, I don’t have access to install ISAPI filters and my web host won’t install them for me.

There are a few different 404 page-based hacks that allow you to retain your permalinks, even with IIS. The most popular fix, which worked fine for me, was Keyboard Face’s IIS Permalink Fix. I used his fix, and a GET variable fix from Ikailo to make a PHP-based 404 page that redirects all 404 pages back into WordPress, thereby bypassing the need for mod_redirect.

Read the rest of this entry » Permalinks and mod_rewrite Headaches in WordPress with IIS