WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-Er

This post brought to you by the letter “D” and the number “7″. D is for Dan who’s an almost thirty web developer and blogger hailing from the Great North and 7 for the number of paragraphs you will be subjected you to.

Let’s face it… all the stuff you heard about setting up your own website being difficult was not true. Most blog owners are not tech-savvy people and everyone including your grandmother has a website now. My websites have evolved over time and transitioned through various blogging platforms giving me a taste of what options everyone has when they choose to put up a site. One of the things I’ve learned is that while it’s nice to have all the newest and coolest widgets, plugins and advertisements on your website you have to keep in mind that the more fancy things you add the more that has to load for every viewer who comes to visit. The key thing to having a website is to keep it running smoothly and provide readers with a pleasant experience.

For every widget that you add to your website you are adding one more call to an external website every time your page loads. You must also remember that if one of these external websites is experiencing problems it will directly affect the loading time of your own website. A perfect example of this would be any blogger who uses a twitter plugin to display their tweets or whatever they’re called (I do not use twitter). I do know however that the twitter website experiences above average downtime.

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