Zazzle Blog

Trudging Across The Tundra

Sometimes, you have to take a step back and look at where you are before you are able to move forward in any reasonable way. When you have your head down, trudging across the tundra, mile after mile, you forget to look up every so often to see if you are moving in the right direction. Well, we just looked up. And we noticed that there were many places we could optimize in our code…from CSS to HTML to JavaScript.

In this latest incarnation of the Zazzle website, there are more behind the scenes changes than there are…well, things that there are a lot of. We took the time to essentially restructure our pages for performance and scalability, by doing a few simple things: organize page elements to load in a specific order, remove huge chunks of now redundant CSS, and implement a new design that allows us to use less images and HTML.

If You Build It Right, It Will Come Faster

Our first task was to take a look at the overall structure of our pages. This includes everything from what’s in the HEAD section, to where we load in our JavaScript. The important thing to note about this is that by structuring our pages in a consistent way throughout our site, we could now make better decisions about what external files need to be loaded, and where. This also allowed us to make the decision to load most, if not all, of our JavaScript at the very bottom of every document.

So what, you ask? In our old site, we would load in a default CSS file for all pages, and if anything on that page needed special stylings, we would override them with styles from another file specific to that page. Ok, makes sense. And we still actually do that.

But the big difference is that now that the pages are structured in a consistent manner, it’s a lot easier to NOT have to do an override of an override of an override to achieve a particular look since we are only loading in the CSS files that are needed. There were many cases before where we had many CSS files loaded for a page, each performing overrides.

On top of that, the CSS itself has been optimized in many places, mostly due to the simplified HTML markup that makes up the page. Simpler markup means simpler CSS…which leads to much less code. How much less? We estimate that there is approximately 50% LESS CSS than before, and with a much cleaner user interface. Win-win baby!

Loading JavaScript at the bottom of each page also serves two purposes. One, the page HTML loads and displays to the user while downloading instead of waiting for JavaScript to download. Second, it allows us to easily “wire up” scripted elements on the page once the page is complete. The advantage there is that at this point we are certain all elements exist and the JavaScript can run unfettered.

Rounded Corners Are So 2003

There are some things HTML/CSS just doesn’t do well. Rounded corners are one of those things. Our old design used many rounded corners all over the place, which caused us to create something we called a “zBox”. What is a zBox? It’s basically a bunch of HTML and CSS that would render a box container with rounded corners. We made it so easy for us to use that whenever we needed to add a new container to our page, we’d simply call our zBox component.

The only problem was that a zBox contained a significant amount of HTML and CSS, not to mention images that needed to be loaded for the corners. It was not unheard of to have a page with half a dozen or more zBoxes.

With our redesign, we decided to simplify…not only the code, but the entire look of the site. This meant getting rid of the ubiquitous zBox. By simply replacing zBoxes with single DIV containers, we were able to remove huge amounts of markup and images, making each page that much lighter to load.

Here’s an example piece of code for a zBox:

<div class=”zBox” id=”divId”>
<div class=”zBoxTop”>
<div class=”zBoxTopDiv1″></div>
<div class=”zBoxTopDiv2″></div>
</div>
<div class=”zBoxMiddle”>
<div class=”zBoxContentWrapper”>
<div class=”zBoxContent clearfix” id=”innerDivId”>
##content##
</div>
</div>
<div class=”zBoxContentDiv1″></div>
<div class=”zBoxContentDiv2″></div>
</div>
<div class=”zBoxBottom”>
<div class=”zBoxBottomDiv1″></div>
<div class=”zBoxBottomDiv2″></div>
</div>
</div>

And here’s that same container without using zBox:

<div class=”myClass“ id=”divId”>
##content##
</div>

And that’s not even including the CSS and images that are needed! So needless to say, with our new simplified design, we were able to cut tons of unneeded code from the site. It’s like Zazzle went on a diet and looks great!

Even The Skin is Low Fat

With our svelte new design and our consistent page structure, we are now able to provide room for future growth. And where do growths usually occur? Well, on the skin, of course! Yes, gross analogy aside, we will be able to offer the ability to skin parts of our site!

We already provide themes for contributors to skin their entire galleries. This helps contributors create a brand and experience tied to their art and designs. The steps we’re taking with our website technology move towards deep level customizations. Imagine being able to skin the gallery with even more control (like custom CSS!) – just like we’ve started to on Zazzle. The possibilities will be endless!

This entry was posted on September 13, 2007 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Nerdy Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.