Category Archives: Business Process

The Importance of Page Loading Time

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Customers are very fickle when checking out a company’s web site.  Unless they’re desperate, a person browsing a site tend to go quickly from one page to another.  Their attention span is short.  Their time is valuable.  They don’t want to spend too much time waiting for a web page to load.

Companies have spent a substantial amount of money to improve page loading times.  Improvements include upgrading internet connectivity, buying faster computers, reducing web applications RAM usage footprint, or investing on a content delivery network.

What other important reasons to improve web performance?

  • Increase in traffic due to natural business growth, or advertising campaigns.
  • Snappy response times are required when using the latest web browser tools, such as AJAX.
  • Google is planning to rank web pages by their load times.
  • Increase use of videos using embedded Flash, and future HTML5.

There is a cheaper way to improve web site performance: Optimize Content.  It means reducing the use of heavy graphics, Flash files, or client side Javascripts.  It also means reducing HTML and CSS file sizes.  It may seem contradictory, but ultimately, content dictates page loading times and can improve the web browsing experience.

Fun Intel Ads

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Intel is an innovator.  They’re the best CPU maker in the world.  Their marketing ads are usually forgettable.  However, the latest Intel ads are actually quite good.  Here are some of my favorites:

Rock Star:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqLPHrCQr2I

Parties:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddZo9GEAUrg

Team Players:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6nOlgNJfHo

Co-workers:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWd_yG_a-CQ

Perks:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36d7jLn0pQY

Jokes:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0FULHGwPkw

Green IT

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computer_green-s2There is a big push by every company to go “green”.  The initiative started with the rising energy prices.  Another reason for the effort is to reduce pollution and waste.  Nowadays, it looks like the overall purpose for this push is to improve public relation and corporate image.

IT is certainly the first (and best) place to start for going green.  The savings are easily measurable and the latest technology allows the reduction in expense.

Shared Services

This model works best when a company has divisions around the globe.  A centralized data center, with excellent resources, needs to be chosen to handle the IT needs of the regional offices.   The consolidation includes servers and experienced IT teams.  With one data center, IT will save money by cutting the expenses of maintaining multiple sites.

Professional Open Source

Much of the open source products out there are excellent.  The support of the community made them a valuable source of technology.  The cost of open source software is free to begin with, so comparatively, building a professional version of it will be much less than a proprietary one.  The value in professional open source is in the tech support, which is the main reason a company purchases an Enterprise product.

Virtualization

With increasing CPU power, and decreasing prices for memory and hard drives, building a powerful server is easy and affordable.  Hardware capabilities have now outpaced the software requirements.  Modern operating systems are now able to “virtualize“, or carve out sub-sections, within the same hardware, to multiple software applications.  In a data center environment, the reduction in server hardware will be apparent by cutting power, rack space, and licensing requirements.

SaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) is valuable when IT resource is severely limited.  One example is outsourcing a company that does e-mail newsletters.  For a company to run an in-house mail server, it will require a lot of resources.  Running bulk mailing lists through it will burden the infrastructure even more, possibly running the risk of an outage.  Outsourcing the software will also off-load the hardware, as well as the man power to maintain it.

The real benefits are to cut costs, reduce duplications, and streamline processes.    These should be standard operating procedure for every company.  Whether or not these steps are considered “green” is a matter of opinion, but everyone needs a renewed purpose to refocus on saving money.  It’s especially relevant in this slumping economy.  Going green is a great idea – only if it’s implemented efficiently, without much bureaucracy, paperwork, and politics.