Asian Tiger

One of the important criterias for a good site is the speed for which the site loads up. Many visitors are turned off by the long loading time especially among the dial-up visitors. Check your visitors statistics to find out the percentage of dial-up visitors you have (Mine says 68% of the visitors are on dial-up).

With the majority of my visitors on dail-up, it is timely that I check my site’s speed performance so that I do not lose my visitors to slow site loading.

My favourite free tool is the Web Page Analyzer located at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/.

This tool is so simple to use; simply key in the URL to analyse and click on “Submit Query”.
Wait a couple of seconds and the page you specified will be examined and a report will be provided.
Various statistics will be provided for you to study and make decisions about your site.
The best part of this tool is the “Recommendations” section. In this section, various recommendations to attributes are presented and you can immediately zoom into the areas of improvements.

I ran a test on AmosWong.com and looks like I have some work to do for this blog.

I was reading some interesting history on Google while I was searching for their successful reasons. Google is probably a classic rags to riches story and I intend to learn from their success. From my search, Google based their philosphy on the following 5 principles:

1. Work on things that matter - probably talking about prioritizing tasks on hand
2. Affect everyone in the world - probably about impacting people’s life in a big way
3. Solve problems using algorithms - must be talking about computerization and automation
4. Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom - surely this must mean building employees’ creativity
5. Don’t be afraid to try new things - hmm… don’t quite catch this

Right now, I’m starting off with point number 1. See you at the finish line.

How would you like to decorate your blog with your very own customized blog buttons just like the one I’ve done within 5 minutes (see below button that says “Amos Wong”).

The tool used to create this button is very straight-forward and easy to use. As I’ve said before, the above button is created within 5 minutes after some trial and error. If you feel adventurous enough, start creating your own blog buttons. As a start, click on the URL below:
http://www.lucazappa.com/brilliantMaker/buttonImage.php

I propose you use Internet Explorer. Not that I’m promoting IE but my Firefox browser hung a number of times while using this tool.
I recommend that you use the Silkscreen font as this font is seen to be the “de facto” font for blog buttons. I’ve tried other fonts and it did not render well for my texts.
Enter texts for the left and right box respectively.
Select the colors you desire and finally
Click on the “Create” button.
Voila! Your very own blog button is generated.

Note: You can specify images that you want added into your blog buttons too. Isn’t this cool?
Be an official Amos fan by using this blog button: