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One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web app

One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it. I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold. That said, I think the leap from 100 to 10,000 users is very hard, and I don't know of any advice about how to cross that gap.

gr33nman 9y ago
How did you determine that speed was what gave the site its first toehold? Did you collect some kind of data that supported your internal push to make that a priority?
- daleco 9y ago
  It depends on the use case but loading time is very important. People will engage more with a site where they can move freely and focus on the content rather than a loading page. The longer the loading time the more likely users will click away.
KGIII 9y ago
Would that be covered under UX? Loading speed seems like something that would be under the UX heading, at least it is as I understand it. Also, when we started to model pedestrian traffic, we also began to start on the long road to releasing software so that we could sell the software and the companies could model their own traffic. (Many companies consider such data to be proprietary and it can be difficult working for them because of their protective nature.) We were able to get consultation through Jacob Nielson. He was still fairly new to the game (early 2000s) and things like eye tracking were just coming into the fray. I wasn't able to attend any of his meetings and didn't have much to do with the specifics. But, my employees were happy with him and our customers were happy with the results. He's mentioned in the article by NN Group, which is Nielsen Norman Group. The employees were happy and, as mentioned, so weren't our clients. They were also able to take what they learned and apply it to our internal applications and processes. (UX is much more than UI.) This, in turn, helped us more than what we'd expected. I distinctly recall QA being happy with a number of changes. But, it points to the value of good UX and the benefit of getting a professional to consult or, perhaps, directly on staff. Because of my lack of direct involvement, I'm not going to specifically recommend them - I don't feel as though I'm qualified to do so. I will say that the results were very good. We'd chosen them because one of our employees had been following their site and was very impressed with the work they were doing with regards to web sites. It was that same employee who had recommended we get a UX consultant in, in the first place. Given the results, I am happy to have listened.
shostack 9y ago
This is also important for SEO these days. If you have site speed issues, particularly on mobile, you could run into issues.
nathan_f77 9y ago
Yeah, especially your landing page. My site is a mix of Rails and static generators, but I scrape the Rails pages with wget --recursive, and then upload everything to S3, and put it all behind CloudFlare. You can put your Rails app behind CloudFlare too, but this way your site will never, ever go down.
- nsomaru 9y ago
  How do you handle things like form submits? How do you mix rails and static files? Using Nginx?
  - nathan_f77 9y ago
    My sign up page includes Recaptcha and requires a valid Stripe card token, so I can keep that static without worrying about CSRF. However, the sign in page is loaded from the Rails app server, and includes a CSRF token. The form submits all go to the Rails app server, which is running on a subdomain. I run a rake task to scrape all of the landing page content from the Rails app, then copy in the static docs site, and upload everything to S3. So it's like I'm using Rails as a static site generator. Basically my root domain is all static files, served from S3 / Cloudflare. And the Rails server is running on an "app" subdomain. I think it's been working pretty well. In the future I might make the whole app static, and just use Rails as an API.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/amazon-aws-s3-outage-is-breaking-things-for-a-lot-of-websites-and-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/amazon-aws-s3-outage-is-br... :p

gr33nman 9y ago

How did you determine that speed was what gave the site its first toehold? Did you collect some kind of data that supported your internal push to make that a priority?

daleco 9y ago
It depends on the use case but loading time is very important. People will engage more with a site where they can move freely and focus on the content rather than a loading page. The longer the loading time the more likely users will click away.

KGIII 9y ago

Would that be covered under UX? Loading speed seems like something that would be under the UX heading, at least it is as I understand it. Also, when we started to model pedestrian traffic, we also began to start on the long road to releasing software so that we could sell the software and the companies could model their own traffic. (Many companies consider such data to be proprietary and it can be difficult working for them because of their protective nature.) We were able to get consultation through Jacob Nielson. He was still fairly new to the game (early 2000s) and things like eye tracking were just coming into the fray. I wasn't able to attend any of his meetings and didn't have much to do with the specifics. But, my employees were happy with him and our customers were happy with the results. He's mentioned in the article by NN Group, which is Nielsen Norman Group. The employees were happy and, as mentioned, so weren't our clients. They were also able to take what they learned and apply it to our internal applications and processes. (UX is much more than UI.) This, in turn, helped us more than what we'd expected. I distinctly recall QA being happy with a number of changes. But, it points to the value of good UX and the benefit of getting a professional to consult or, perhaps, directly on staff. Because of my lack of direct involvement, I'm not going to specifically recommend them - I don't feel as though I'm qualified to do so. I will say that the results were very good. We'd chosen them because one of our employees had been following their site and was very impressed with the work they were doing with regards to web sites. It was that same employee who had recommended we get a UX consultant in, in the first place. Given the results, I am happy to have listened.

shostack 9y ago

This is also important for SEO these days. If you have site speed issues, particularly on mobile, you could run into issues.

nathan_f77 9y ago

Yeah, especially your landing page. My site is a mix of Rails and static generators, but I scrape the Rails pages with wget --recursive, and then upload everything to S3, and put it all behind CloudFlare. You can put your Rails app behind CloudFlare too, but this way your site will never, ever go down.

nsomaru 9y ago
How do you handle things like form submits? How do you mix rails and static files? Using Nginx?
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  My sign up page includes Recaptcha and requires a valid Stripe card token, so I can keep that static without worrying about CSRF. However, the sign in page is loaded from the Rails app server, and includes a CSRF token. The form submits all go to the Rails app server, which is running on a subdomain. I run a rake task to scrape all of the landing page content from the Rails app, then copy in the static docs site, and upload everything to S3. So it's like I'm using Rails as a static site generator. Basically my root domain is all static files, served from S3 / Cloudflare. And the Rails server is running on an "app" subdomain. I think it's been working pretty well. In the future I might make the whole app static, and just use Rails as an API.
mi100hael 9y ago
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/amazon-aws-s3-outage-is-breaking-things-for-a-lot-of-websites-and-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/amazon-aws-s3-outage-is-br... :p