The Jessicat – Why Serge only rss this page

First up, Serge would like to say congratulations to Jessica Tan who has shifted from Benjicajess to JessicaT. Remember to treat Christopher Tock as he is the one who owns your domain.

After the jump, Serge will lay the low down on JessicaT and do note that this is Serge’s opinion.

Serge has always love the creativity of Jess, but the header image here is kind of useless really. Refreshing the page will make the right side image to change and even though it looks really funky and shows the hawtness of Jess; it takes sometime for Serge to load the page again. And why the fuck is that twitter badge there ? Load time again here is an issue. Creativity 7/10 , Usability, 0/10

Next up, Serge would like to ask Jess to use the damn fucking “READ MORE” . Her writing style is good and she knows how and when to use photos to emphasize her content. All of this is fine if it was in the permalink section. Serge does not condone massive text and image to be seen on a main page. Reason being, it takes too damn long to load. Worst of all, when image used is linked from another source.

The image below is the speed difference between Jess’s site and Serge’s site.

As one can see Serge’s site opens in roughly 7.1 seconds while Jess’s opens in 21 seconds. For your information, Serge here uses images that is pulled from Flickr just like Jess. So why is it that ? The answer is simple, it has to do with how the main page content is set up.

Jess here writes everything in one go and because it is a long wall of text with images, it takes time to load. Serge on the other hand uses one image and a small block of text followed by a MORE then anything goes. This way Serge’s site loads fast as we all know text no matter how long is just a few kb while many images can bring on to a few hundred kb or so.

The other reason why Jess’s page loads slow is this image right here ::

Holy fucks ! That is one major majorly long and wrong sidebar.

Sidebars to Wordpress users such as Serge is a double edge sword. Too little content and it seems empty, too much content and you will screw yourself over. Jess’s sidebar is on the path of no salvation and if she does not change it soon; Serge is going to RSS her only.

Too many image on the sidebar. This should be reduced. As Jess is sponsored and affiliated with some good company, Serge suggest that she makes a dedicated wordpress page for it. That Recent Readers thingy ? Useless really, so remove it.

Serge’s overall low down

Design – 7/10
Content – 8/10
Sidebar – 1/10
Mainpage Content- 1/10
Usability – 2/10

19/50

Design is how the layout in general, Content is the writing style, Sidebar as it is, Mainpage Content is how the content is place in the main page, Usability is how user friendly it is to new visitors which includes load speed too.