One of the biggest killers of a website is slow performance. A few years ago, the rule was to have your website load no longer than 13 seconds on a 56k modem. In the age of high speed internet, your site shouldn’t take longer than 5 seconds to load up. This magic number derives from the bounce rate of internet users based on load time, and with such strict guidelines, I find it amazing that most developers place performance last on their priority list. Although there are tons of tips and tricks to use while optimizing a website, a really easy one is to add gzip to your web server.

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I had recently had an issue with a website where two different URL’s pointed to the exact same page.The website serves up dynamic content, and generates products pages on the fly, which is the norm for e-commerce sites. But instead of using a query string, we use the mod rewrite to change the url into a prettier form (mod rewrite). The issue is that when I inherited the site, the previous developer had used the url in this form.

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I just recently finished a project which involved me developing an XML loaded Banner Rotator and I thought I’d share the process with you folks. The key features of this XML Loaded Banner Rotator is that you can add as many images as you would need, and each image can hold a hyperlink. Bloomingdales has a similar rotating banner, and so I modeled mine after what they had. If you lovely people would like to view a demo of this XML Loaded Banner Rotator, then please click here, or you can take a hike, because hiking is very good exercise.

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Ever have an issue where firefox puts an annoying image padding under every image?

This is especially annoying when dealing with sliced images that you’re trying to piece together.

Here is a simple solution that I found out, and it couldn’t be easier.

Hopefully this simple css code will prevent you from tying a rope to the cieling and hanging yourself.

Place this style on every page, and you should be set.

If I saved even one life from this, than I know I’ve done my job. Now will someone please give me a job?I’m broke.

Search Engine Optimization is a huge industry where companies get paid millions of dollars to boost their rankings to the top of Google. Now this article will not try to explain all the little tricks to achieve a higher search rank, but one way to improve the likelihood of having better SEO would be to clean up your damn URL.

If you are hosted onto an apache server then please continue, otherwise this information would be complete and utter garbage to you.

So how can you clean up a url that looks like this:

/certificate.php?folder=men&sort=date&order=desc&page=1

To a url that looks like this:

/certificate/men/date/desc/1/

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