Jonathan
I think that a lot would depend on the nature of the site, its type of
content and modes of user interaction.
Do you fear the site being too slow primarily because of:
a. sheer amount of data? - if so, is this structured and repetitive -
can large parts it be coded? Can results be paged?
b. complex interactions with the user?
c. huge volume of visitors causing overload, WWWait and perhaps
timeouts?
Is the traffic load likely to be fairly stable/steady? OR likely to
experience sudden bursts of hectic activity in certain circumstances/
certain times of day/certain events (eg ticket sales for my next world
concert series (:-) ) /etc?
Have you fully exhausted all the normal/typical/standard ways of
achieving a "lean-clean" website such as:
1. Fully semantic markup, XHTML Strict, no deprecated old-style HTML
tags, carefully worked out CSS, avoiding redundancy/repetition.
2. All CSS definitions (and Javascript if you have any) held in
shared external files (not inline styling and not using head section).
3. No use of tables for layout (use only for truly tabular data). No
nested tables under any circumstances.
4. Nil or minimum use of graphics. All images optimized to smallest
weight.
5. Using a compiled language environment such as ASP.Net with C# or
VB. (if there is a lot of server-side processing to be done).
6. Ensuring database tables are fully normalized, use concise methods
of data representation, etc.
... and so on.
Most sites that perform very slowly:
(i) are very poorly coded (server-side, X/HTML, JS, CSS);
(ii) try to do too much all at once (over-busy pages; excessive
dependence on complex database retrieval);
(ii) have inadequate infrastructure (poor server hosting etc) relative
to the amount of traffic experienced.
Does this help?
Robbo
On Nov 28, 3:24 am, Jonathan Dingman wrote:
> We have a few sites that rely heavily upon SEO. We also have a lot of
> sites on our server, so we want to minimize load time and maximize
> efficiency.
> With those key components in mind, here are some thoughts.
> I've been contacting a well known search expert back and forth.
> The question of: does using XML and XSLT together make for a well
> search engine optimized site?
> The XSLT would be processed all on the client-side so the XML would be
> output plainly to Google.
> This was their most relevant response:
> "Googlebot will index XML as XML. Google does rank XML pages in the
> main index but they prefer to rank a normal HTML page. So, yes they
> understand it but we still should provide an HTML version"
> So my question here is this: what would be the best way to tackle
> this and accomplish a lite-weight website while still achieving a well
> optimized site for the search engines?
