from the book Don’t Make Me Think
Web Site Design CONCEPTS
What is the purpose of your index, home, landing, page? Also, people won’t use your Website if they can’t find their way around it.
“As far as humanly possible, when I look at a Web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory. I should be able to ‘get it’ – what it is and how to use it – without expending any effort thinking about it.”
The second chapter dramatizes the difference between what we design for, and the reality of how users use the Web. In particular:
* People don’t read, they scan
* Users don’t make the best choice, they select the first “good enough” solution
* Visitors don’t figure out how things work, they “muddle” through
http://www.ratz.com/featuresgood.html
http://www.ratz.com/featuresbad.html
http://ls.berkeley.edu/lscr/advice/web/design
Many people may come to your web site from a search engine and will not land directly on your welcome, home, page. If they click the “Back” button they will return to the search engine and not to you! By having a title, either image or text, that is a link, in the top left corner, where they expect it, you’ll make your site easier to get around and you’ll keep your visitors on your site longer.
People expect there to be a series of text links at the bottom of every web page on your web site. One of the first links should be a “home” link, which serves the same function as the image or link at the top of the web page. Please note that this is text and not images. People expect it to be text, and this also helps search engines crawl through your web site with ease.
1. A Good Website is Compelling: It Provides Value to Your Audience that draws them to your site again and again.
2. A Good Website Meets Clearly Identified Goals
3. A Good Website is Easy to Navigate
4. Visual Attractiveness of a Site: although visual attractiveness is an important element, compelling content, clearly defined goals and easy navigation are equally important.
Many people make the mistake of throwing music, little animations or scrolling text on there site without any real reason. This does not make a good looking site. All this does is make your site look like a Neon Billboard. Please, Don’t Do This !
Make your design clean and simple. Use images and design as a vehicle to achieve the goals you set out for your website.
Apache vs. Lighttpd
Lighttpd was developed to be a light web server focused on serving 10,000 concurrent connections.
Compared to Apache 1.3, release 2.x contains many additional optimizations to increase throughput and scalability.
MySQL query cache
The query cache stores the text of a SELECT statement together with the corresponding result that was sent to the client. If an identical statement is received again, the server retrieves the results from the query cache rather than parsing and executing the statement again. The query cache is shared among sessions, so a result set generated by one client can be sent in response to the same query issued by another client.
The query cache can be useful in an environment where you have tables that do not change very often and for which the server receives many identical queries. This is a typical situation for many Web servers that generate many dynamic pages based on database content. . . . [blogs, e-commerce, etc.]
mysql> SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = 16777216; # set to 16 meg
mysql> SET GLOBAL query_cache_type=1;
# 1 = Cache all query results except for those that begin with SELECT S_NO_CACHE.
mysql> SET GLOBAL query_cache_limit=1048576;
# the maximum size of individual query results that can be cached