Web Performance Matters

I was going to write about performance and availability today, but this was not the post I had in mind. Technorati sidetracked me. So I'm going to write about Usability instead. Because Technorati provides a good counter-example -- how not to build a usable Web application that satisfies and retains customers.

In Web Usability: A Simple Framework, I described a way to think about Web site or Web application usability.

In a second post, The Dimensions of Usability, I presented the graphic shown here, and discussed the four dimensions in a bit more detail.

These four dimensions are not alternative functional goals, to be weighed against one another and prioritized. Web application effectiveness is a four-step challenge:

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Coding Horror

The best products are designed with Human Factors in mind. That's why I often write about Web design and usability in my Web Performance Matters blog.

Jeff Atwood recently published Thirteen Blog Clichés, a post summarizing his "opinions about what makes blogs work well, and what makes blogs sometimes not work so well." These are presented as a list of common mistakes to avoid (or anti-patterns). If you have a blog, or are designing one, you've probably read similar articles before. Even so, Jeff's checklist is worth a look. All such lists tend to contain a core set of common guidelines to follow and/or pitfalls to avoid, but some of Jeff's opinions step outside the conventional wisdom.

Because I maintain two blogs -- Web Performance Matters and UpRight Matters -- I decided to rate both blogs against Jeff's criteria. Here are edited versions of his recommendations, and my responses. To read Jeff's full discussions of each guideline, see the original. And for the full story, see the many responses posted by Jeff's readers in the comments section of his blog.

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If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

--Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, 1949 [Wikipedia]

In May 2007, after I wrote about Controlling What You Can't Measure, I had a conversation with Ben Simo (see the comments) about metrics and tools ...

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My recent post, Asynchronous Architectures [4], summarized a presentation by Werner Vogels at the 2007 QCON conference in London.

A subsequent post by Kent Langley in his new ProductionScale blog -- entitled Getting Rid of the Relational Database -- supports the arguments advanced by Vogels.

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