Redesigning my website apart from the looks overhaul I wanted it to be quick and light with minimal requests. Through using CDN’s and minifying I got it to a decent speed however there was high requests and quick speeds was still lacking.

The dilemma

These ‘issues’ revolved around images, wanting to keep on the one page website notion i had a section for my projects, images, videos and GitHub gists. The problem was that for every project, image and video listed there needed to be an image/logo/thumbnail. This added to the requests and content needing to be loaded. Even with Jpg images it was a weak point.

To better sort these 4 categories out i used nav tabs. I love these and use them in a lot of my websites. They do a great job at hiding and revealing content without needing to reload the page, check them out at ffmpegr. Even with the nav tabs and without looking at extensive Javascript the images were seen as a massive dent in my quest for a light and fast webpage.

The result

I got rid of them, in the end they actually added little. If someone wants to see my photography they can go to the VSCO link on the nav bar same for videos with the YouTube link and GitHub with the GitHub link.

Removing the images knocked of almost a second in page load and halved my requests. I also believe the webpage looks better without the images because it runs in well with the simple clean look. Images have their place in design and unless it’s a masterpiece its best to leave it off the page in my opinion.