Forum Moderators: phranque
If I said to you that I had a magic wand that I could wave at your website and it would load up to 40% faster just by me waving my wand, would you pay an acceptable amount for the service?
Acceptable means different things to everyone. If you're Yahoo, acceptable might be a million dollars. If you're a guy in your basement, acceptable might be 50 dollars. Just imagine it's something that would be reasonable.
This method is also variant depending on sites - on some sites that have already been touched by a wand, I might very well not improve anything. On some sites it could be a drastic load time improvement.
It would work like this: You contact me and ask me to assess your site. I look at it and say "I can increase your load time by x%". If this is cool with you, you give me money, and I wave my wand. If the price was acceptable, would you do it?
Please note this is all just an idea at this point - I wanted to solicit opinion from a "target audience" first. If nobody would go for it I won't waste time putting any time into it.
Thanks for any feedback.
- Tony
dreamquick:
I'm thinking of a sort of in-between. If you want to (or have access to) the server, then some modifications can be made there. If you just have access to a directory that you upload pages to, that would also work. I'm actually thinking of three levels:
terse: "Here's the base concept, here are some generic links and DIY (i.e. the draw of jpg over gif for photos)"
default: "Here's the detailed concept, and these are the exact changes you should make (i.e. make thisfile.gif a .jpg)"
verbose: "This is what's wrong, here are the new files - just upload them" - this option is where applicable - if they're external files (.jpg, .html) I can just send you files, or cut-and-paste modifications. Obviously I can't do this server-side.
I also forgot to mention that this method will not degrade any existing content. Everything will look exactly the same when I'm done as before I started.
edit reason - added clarification
Personally I like the concept of "verbose" as you could quite easily sell that as a subscription based service - £5 gets you X single page optimisations etc. That sort of thing is not what I would pay for but I think lots of people could find a use for it.
I assume you have an automated method to performance optimise, if so then the only problems I see are to do with;
How are you going to prove to me your service has really optimised my page - what happens if I dispute this fact once I have my page back?
How are you going to handle the multitude of additional files associated with a page (e.g. if it has external javascript, css as well as images)?
Dynamic server-side code being embedded in pages - if I am able to pass raw source then that would be perfect as it means I can copy & paste the page into your service and copy & paste the results back to my editor. However could your system understand when ASP/PHP code blocks begin? As a minimum would it be able to just leave that code alone rather than try to optimise it?
If you were handling dynamic code what guarantees do I have that you keep my pages (potentially expensive business logic/intellectual property) private, don't share them with anyone etc., especially if you keep a backup copy on the off-chance I want to come back and pick up an optimised page I've lost on my own system.
- Tony
In any case, sounds like a resource page, where you give things away for free, but have one product or service that you discreetly sell. That way, you can get into the major db's as a non-commercial do it yourself web site.
As a professional web master, I myself have no need for this tool. My pages don't come out that heavy. But a newbie would most probably gravitate to something like this.
BTW, welcome to webmasterworld. Don't merely take and go disappearing after this thread. Contribute something. ;)
