User First Web

We need your help for a research project we’re conducting at Cloud Four. Read more about the research and how you can help by simply viewing a web page on your mobile phone.

I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking at Web Visions on May 23rd on “Going Fast on the Slow Mobile Web.”

Speaking at Web Visions has been a goal of mine for a few years now. Every year Web Vision brings the best and brightest to Portland to talk about the future of web development. After each conference, I’d tell my co-workers that the following year I was going to put together a presentation for Web Visions. Well, I finally did it! :-)

My topic this year combines two interests of mine: the mobile web and web site performance. We’ll be covering the steps necessary to make the web as fast as possible on mobile devices including looking at device-specific details that make performance on mobile devices more challenging.

I’m honored to be included with such a list of illustrious speakers. As I mentioned in my previous post, Jeffrey Veen’s presentation from Web Visions is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Roger Black is one of the big names in design. I’m stunned to be sharing the stage with them. Then we’ve got fellow twitterers and friends like Erica O’Grady and Scott Kveton. And I could go as there are so many names on that speakers list that I admire.

I’m truly overwhelmed and looking forward to May. I hope to see you there. Sign up today for early bird rates.

If you are interested in attending Web Visions, I encourage you to register now as the early bird rate ends tomorrow.

If you haven’t been to Web Visions before, you’re missing out. It is a top-caliber event. It takes place in Portland, and is reasonably priced. You’d be hard pressed to find a better deal.

At my previous job, I took my entire team to Web Visions every year. For the same price I would spend to send a single person to a more expensive conference in another city, I could send my whole team.

This year’s speaker line up is exceptional and includes a keynote by Jeffrey Veen whose last keynote at Web Visions was worth the price of admission alone. His presentation remains my favorite and is something that I’ve used to inform my thinking many times.

So if you do anything web related, I can’t recommend this conference enough. Plus, you may recognize a familiar name on the speaker list. :-)

Verizon announced that they would open their network late last year. Last week they provided details which shows that it isn’t terribly open.

Verizon also one the recent spectrum bidding where again, the definition of open is being debated.

Carlo Longino of MobHappy has written about how “open” has become the big buzzword for mobile this year, but most of what is being called open isn’t really very open.

My favorite is Sprint’s new “OpenWeb” service which seems to be breaking everything on the web. What a mess.

One of the reasons for my interest in site performance is because these techniques become even more important when developing for mobile. Google published some recent evidence supporting this belief.

“We saw something similar after we launched an updated interface for Gmail on the iPhone during MacWorld earlier this year. Lots of iPhone users tried the new interface (hence the bump in Gmail pageviews between January and February), but they didn’t stick around like we hoped they would. Over the course of the next few weeks, we made some tweaks to drastically improve the speed of the product, and Gmail pageviews on the iPhone not only stabilized, but began to rise, as the graph below shows:”

Read more at Google’s blog.

One of the arguments I made in my presentation on site performance last year was that making small changes to your site to speed it up can make a big difference in your revenue. This was based on bandwidth savings.

However, now marketers using Google Adwords have an additional incentive to make their pages load quickly. Google is incorporating landing page load time as one of the factors for evaluating the quality ranking of an ad:

“Users value ads that bring them to the information they want as efficiently as possible. A high-quality landing page should load quickly as well as feature unique, relevant content. Fast load times benefit advertisers as well, since users are less likely to abandon a site that loads quickly.”

For companies that are spending thousands of dollars on text ads, ignoring their landing page load time could be spendy.

In case you missed, tests show that Safari on the iPhone will only cache objects that are under 25k. Something to keep in mind as you build your iPhone web apps.

I’m going to be speaking at the PDX Web Innovators February meeting on Mobile Web and the upcoming mobile tsunami. I’m excited to have the opportunity to share my love for the mobile web and possibilities available for businesses and developers.

Here are the details:

Graciously Hosted by Nemo Design
1875 Se Belmont St
Portland, Oregon
February 13th, 7 pm
PDX Web Innovators
RSVP Here

In preparation for this event, I’m going to be starting a series of blog posts talking about the mobile market and how it mirrors the early days of the Internet. These posts are likely going to be posted on Cloud Four’s blog, but I’ll be sure to link to them from here.

During CES, NewsGator has released its RSS readers for Mac and PC for free. On the Mac, it means that NetNewsWire, my favorite RSS reader and the tool I’ve relied on every day for years, is now free. For PC users, FeedDemon is now free.

Go download it.

Why a desktop RSS reader? Nick Bradbury does a great job of explaining what you get with a desktop reader instead of web-based one like Google Reader.

One of the great things about the NewsGator products sync their feeds and item status to NewsGator’s online service. You can then check your RSS feeds via the web or through the great iphone interface for NewsGator.

Why do I love NetNewsWire so much? The main reason is the key commands for browsing items. 90% of what you need to do can be done via the arrow keys. Ode to Apple has a great post on how to get the most out of NetNewsWire.

If you’ve been holding out on trying a desktop rss reader, now is a perfect time to give it a try.

The WuFoo guys have a great article on Particletree describing how they are handling automatic versioning of their css and javascript.

This allows you to set your css and javascript expires headers far into the future without worrying about browser caching getting in the way when you need to edit the files.

If you can bear with the confusing way comments are organized on Particletree, there is some good information on alternative methods in the discussion.