Checkpoint Three
Checkpoint Three
Uploaded Site URL: http://doeandsuelawyers.altervista.org/index.php
For this checkpoint, the workload is not as heavy, for those who have minimal issues uploading to a hosting provider anyway. I chose to upload mine to Altervista due to the free service appearing to be more than good enough for my needs.
Hosting
In previous checkpoints, I had already uploaded my website, for this checkpoint I uploaded my new pages & content in order to ensure that it behaves properly on the hosting platform. The process of uploading the site itself was simplistic and proved to be a breeze, other than one instance of my new style.css file not properly overwriting the old one from previous uploads, to fix this I had to rename the stylesheet and have my code point to the new renamed one instead.
Below are screenshots of all my pages once uploaded:
NOTE: The parallax effect isn't shown on the Services pages, the image moves with the page as the user scrolls.
Home
About Us
Our Services
Our Team
Contact Us
Testing on other PC's & Issues
After I confirmed that my site was operating on altervista I set out to testing its current functionality to assure that it operated the same way on the web as I intend it to. First I tested it on my own PC and I noticed that most of my pages had longer load times than they should, this was due to me using high-resolution images for my background parallax effect.
The culprit images needed to be shrunken down in size for my website to remain functional on the web, I also needed to make sure I did not compress them so much that they did not look good anymore. Using a cool the Craig supplied us within a class (Birme.com) I edited my high-resolution photos down to a more acceptable download size, in some cases 4x less than the original size.
Next, I implemented them onto my hosted website and tested the new page loading times. They are all now loading at under 5 seconds which is ideal. Following these changes, I had two of my friends also test my pages, one who lives out in the country on slow internet. They both confirmed that my site was operating as intended.
Next, I implemented them onto my hosted website and tested the new page loading times. They are all now loading at under 5 seconds which is ideal. Following these changes, I had two of my friends also test my pages, one who lives out in the country on slow internet. They both confirmed that my site was operating as intended.
Next, I focused on implementing image sized for mobile that would make the load times even faster, this is important due to a lot of mobile browsing sometimes taking place on 4g/3g instead of an internet connection.
I once again used Birme.com to resize my images down to resolutions that were better suited for mobiles then uploaded them to the hosting service, this drastically improved mobile load times to a point where browsing on 4g was as smooth as expected. I can see how important it is to keep your sites file size down to a minimum when hosting it, keeping it small allows users to quickly and efficiently access the content, if they find themselves having to load for too long they may leave (especially with the short attention span of people in this day and age).
This is my image library after all these changes were made:
I thought I was done at this point, then I decided to browse my website on my phone and noticed that on the services page the image was extremely grainy and looked really low quality. This is due to the parallax effect behaving differently on my phone in that it was choosing a smaller part of the image to display instead of the phone thing.
Parallax doesn't work on mobiles! This means I will have to give the image a larger resolution. I edited the full-size image into a more elongated version so it covered the content without having to distort in order to fit the page. This fixed my problem here and I could move on.
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