This year, An Event Apart and Microsoft are teaming up to bring you 10 K Apart. It's a pretty cool competition with a challenge to build a compelling web experience that can be delivered in 10 KB and works without JavaScript. Believe me - it's not as easy as it…
That's a pretty catchy title for an article, right?! Now that I've lured you onto this page, I am going to do my best to deliver the goods! Without a doubt, WebPageTest is one of my favourite web performance testing tools. It's completely free to use and is such a…
I recently gave a tutorial at Velocity Conference in Santa Clara about some of the amazing features that lie within the browsers we use everyday. As web developers, we are pretty lucky to have such awesome developer tools at our disposal. After the tutorial was complete, a few people asked…
Earlier this year I was lucky enough to get the chance to present at UpFront Conference in Manchester. This was the inaugural year for the conference, and it was great to be apart of this event. A few people have asked about the slide deck and wanted to know more.…
If you browse the web today, there are many articles that explain what browser pre-loading is and how to use it, but very little explain how to actually use this feature in the real world. The ability to prefetch resources is powerful, but if used incorrectly it can turn out…
Using web fonts can be a great way to improve the look and feel of your website. I love tinkering with different font combinations on websites and seeing the changes they make. Unfortunately, adding web fonts to your site adds extra overhead to your site and can often slow your…
Compressing files can be a very effective way of reducing their size as they are transferred between the server and a user's browser. Most modern browsers work effectively with compressed files and use lossless compression formats such as Gzip, Deflate or Zlib. In order to compress a file, an encoder…
I’m proud to say that I will be speaking at UpFront Conference in Manchester, UK on the 19th of May. UpFront Conference is in it’s first year and is billed as “a front-end conference for anyone who makes for the web”. The speaker line-up is packed with great…
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a major part in the way we use the web today. SEO techniques can make your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. I've long been a fan of the Moz blog and their free SEO tools that can help grow…
Using Data URI's can be a great way to reduce the number of HTTP requests that a web page makes. If you've never heard of Data URI's, they are a way of in-lining data in web pages as if they are external resources. This means that instead of adding a…