CSS Presentation

An interesting link from Tom about the use of CSS. It covers basic techniques, but more interestingly covers some of the stats to do with bandwidth savings and page weights. A brief overview: using proper CSS2 and XHTML can radically reduce the size of your pages, because you need less markup in the actual HTML itself. The results can be pretty stunning:

ESPN redesigned their site using CSS2 and XHTML:

• Page reduction (est.) 50 KB
• Page views/day: 40,000,000
• Projected bandwidth savings: 2 terabytes/day
• or 61 terabytes/month
• or 730 terabytes/year

730 terabytes a year!!! That is a whole lot of saved bandwidth just from redesigning your page.

They also include some stats about Microsoft's website before and after redesign:

	Old	New	Savings
Versions	2	1
Tables	40	0
Spacer gifs	35	0
HTML	40 KB	15 KB	62%

62% savings? Thats pretty good. So, I thought I'd carry out some of the same analysis on the current version of World.Cwintra.Com:

	World
Versions	4
Tables	18
Spacer gifs	0
HTML	33 KB

This isn't actually as bad as I feared - the different versions are far too high (we have different stylesheets for each different browser type), but I was surprised to discover a lack of spacer gifs, and although the page weight is quite high, it is the homepage, which will always contain a lot of content. The "Selling To Customers" area homepage was down to 24KB.

So, we're not as bad as Microsoft were, but we could still remove those 18 friggin' tables, in my opinion. If anyone cares to spend the time trying to work out the bandwidth savings this might give us, then please go ahead and post it!

Intranet Usability Conference

Damien gave a speech at a recent intranet usability conference on the importance of search functionality across intranet sites.

At some point in the future, I'll try and get Damien to write a post on here explaining briefly what his key points were, but for now, we'll have to make do with his notes (please note this will open a PowerPoint presentation in a new window).

At the point where one of the team is giving speeches at conferences, you've got to think "well, we must be doing something right". Nice one DK.

Intranet Information

We should improve the level of communication we provide via
world.cwintra.com by keeping information about our current projects
up-to-date. Included in this should be contact numbers and email
addresses where appropriate.

I'll speak to Damien to find our area on world, and get working on it.
Would this be a useful thing to the business? To see us better
represented on the intranet?

IT Request Forms

We have a real problem with the process by which work reaches us from the business. My understanding of this process is as follows:

1. Business wants work done
2. Submits IT Request to outsourced Request department
3. Request is then submitted to internal Request department (Service Management)
4. Internal Request department submit it to our team
5. We read the request and fill in a new form containing costs and timescales
6. We submit that back to the internal Request department
7. They submit that back to the business for their approval of costs and timescales.

Now, maybe its just me, but this strikes me as a bit of a long-winded nightmare. In fact it is common for the business to have to wait 2-3 months (quite seriously) to get to point 7. Now I accept that some process needs to be in place to allow the whole thing to be managed correctly, but this way we're making it really hard for our own company to do business with us! This can't be sensible.

There must surely be a better way. What if we engaged earlier? What if the Service Management portion of this was only put in place after development? Before then, there is no real service anyway. Let us interface with the business and get on with what we do. Would this improve the process? Would it leave us with too much work?

Workspace Issues

Now, if there is one thing that we seem to spend the most amount of time griping about, its surely the office space we're forced to work in. Now, I'm fairly sure we're not just whinging old ladies just yet (although other people may disagree) so this leads me to think that perhaps we do have a point here. To that end, here is a summary of workspace quality discussions from Joel On Software

Incrementalists & Completionists

An interesting article on the different mind sets of developers and IT professionals. It's interesting to hear someone make a cohesive arguement for not doing things The Right Way (tm).