Designing for Performance: Weighing Aesthetics and Speed

As a web designer, you encounter tough choices when it comes to weighing aesthetics and performance. Good content, layout, images, and interactivity are essential for engaging your audience, and each of these elements have an enormous impact on page load time and the end-user experience. In this practical book, Lara Hogan helps you approach projects with page speed in mind, showing you how to test and benchmark which design choices are most critical.

To get started, all you need are basic HTML and CSS skills and Photoshop experience.

Topics include:

• The impact of page load time on your site, brand, and users
• Page speed basics: how browsers retrieve and render content
• Best practices for optimizing and loading images
• How to clean up HTML and CSS, and optimize web fonts
• Mobile-first design with performance goals by breakpoint
• Using tools to measure performance as your site evolves
• Methods for shaping an organization’s performance culture

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Performance Is User Experience
Chapter 2: The Basics of Page Speed
Chapter 3: Optimizing Images
Chapter 4: Optimizing Markup and Styles
Chapter 5: Responsive Web Design
Chapter 6: Measuring and Iterating on Performance
Chapter 7: Weighing Aesthetics and Performance
Chapter 8: Changing Culture at Your Organization