I’ve compiled a list called the New Zealand homepage hall of shame. The list details the download efficiency of the top 75 websites in New Zealand. The survey was conducted using the YSlow tool over the top 75 New Zealand websites from Rankr.

In the results, I’ve included the YSlow ranking, total size of the webpage (this includes all html, css, flash, javascript, images etc) in Kilobytes, the number of external javascpript and CSS files and the time it would take to load on a 56k Modem (@ 6k/s).

The Highlights lowlights of the survey:

• The average size of homepages was 304.9K
• 52% of websites use NO WEB COMPRESSION
• The largest pages were over 1000K
• Several of the top 20 sites in New Zealand were the biggest offenders
• Advertising javascript is not being compressed
• Some sites have dozens of Javascript and CSS files, worst offender had 35 javascript files
  

A number of web companies and web developers should be holding their heads in shame - the results are not flattering. We need to better building smart - download friendly webpages not slow loading monsters !

So without further a due here are the summary tables:

Top 10 worst homepages according to Yslow ranking

Top 10 best homepages according to Yslow ranking

Top 10 largest homepages in Kilobytes

Top 10 smallest homepages in Kilobytes

Here is the complete data for the top 75 New Zealand websites homepages. I have compiled the list from using YSlow to analyse the pages and recording everything. The data is sorted by worst Yslow ranking. (The test was completed 13th of May 2008 between 8-10pm)

I been working on a mini audit of the top 75 New Zealand websites. I took the top 75 NZ websites from Rankr and using YSlow compiled the data last night.

I discovered that …


The Average homepage size in NZ is 304.9K !


That will take almost 51 seconds to load on a modem.

The size is the total downloaded size of all the total html, css, images, js, flash etc. Compressed files are recorded at their compressed size.

Even more scary is 52% of the top NZ website are not using any web compression, 37.3% are using some compression and 10.7% are fully compressed.

We can’t complain about dial up loading speed if our homepages are over 300K!

I’ll be posting the NZ homepages of shame, very shortly.

We’ve been working with one of clients on marker performance. The problem with markers is they take a long time to load up especially when you add a lot of makers eg. over 100 markers. The performance gets worse when you add polygons or polylines to the map and as you add or remove layers to the map

One of the problems is that the marker class is full of features - Info Windows, shadows, custom icons etc. The browser has to manage all of the DOM objects for the functionality.

To improve the performance, we’ve created a new marker class called GMarkerSimple. The class has a cutdown set of features ie. ‘onclick’ and ‘openInfoWindow’ to improve the speed. We have also introduced a marker cache to ‘cache’ marker objects in memory to improve performance when adding and remove marker layers.

The performance improvement is quite astounding, especially when you compare it to Google.

FireFox 2.0.14

IE 6.5

Don’t take our word for it. Try it for yourself - 100 marker test, 300 marker test.

A couple of days ago, ZoomIn passed the 10,000 user mark!

Looking at the stats we currently have over 52,000 places, 5200 pictures, 4000 comments and 1100 ratings.

A big thank you to all our users who have contributed to ZoomIn.

Here’s a selection of the top contributors to ZoomIn, thank you one and all!

benn 300 places, 20 photos, 113 comments

citric_labs 248 places, 0 photos, 1 comment

tagg 204 places, 5 photos, 29 comments

qwandor 176 places, 2 photos, 9 comments

tom 159 places, 135 photos, 29 comments

spangleking 35 places, 471 photos, 22 comments

jac 151 places, 465 photos, 98 comments

daniel_wang 38 places, 255 photos, 30 comments

rosslin 25 places, 163 photos, 25 comments

time2dine 23 places, 3 photos, 114 comments

dayout 115 places, 2 photos, 87 comments

nedbedrock 31 places, 50 photos, 68 comments

nik 53 places, 90 photos, 67 comments

nztr 51 places, 0 photos, 59 comments

I was found this picture on my hard drive showing where all the government agencies are in NZ. We created the image for the Broadband strategy challenge.

I thought it was kinda cool.

Its a big image, a 1.7Mb jpg.

I attended the Spatial barcamp and GoVis conference last week and here are my thoughts.

I thought the conference was great way for the industry to get together and network. It was nice to see some interesting talks from the speakers on how GIS was integrated into enterprise solutions

Open source good, Open standards better

The New Zealand Geospatial Office is promoting the use of open source tools (mapserver, mapguide etc) and open standards around government agencies. Its great to see more open source being promoted.

The use of open standards, KML, WFS, WMS etc will be a good way for people to share data. As a industry we already have a lot of proprietary formats, we need to promote open standards to enable better interaction between organisations.

I would offer a word of caution, using open source tools (just like anything else) is not going to be a magic bullet solution. You need to select the right tool for the job.

At ProjectX, we used a number of open source and propriety tools to make our maps. We’ve switched from mapserver to Manifold and now back to mapserver because the quality of the generated imagery wasn’t good enough for us.

Innovation under the surface

It was great to some innovations and ideas that going on out there. Big things like Aerial capture via microlight and dynamic object tracking systems, and smaller things like Napier City council making more of it core data available via open source tools.

It made me think, that as an industry (and companies in NZ) we don’t market our ideas very well. Even at ProjectX, we have a lot of things we built for clients or internally that is innovative and leading edge that never sees the light of day.

To that end, I’m working with Gavin from gis.org.nz to create a news portal for GIS / Geo-spatial news in New Zealand. We’re looking at creating a news system for companies to talk about new products, ideas and issues in the our space. We’re in the process of setting it up properly now, so stay tuned.

Partnerships

It was refreshing to see that all the GIS departments in the Auckland region were working together. Personally I don’t think there are enough partnerships between players. There is a lot of innovation happening in NZ, and we need to work together to take on the world!

We’ve been working hard over the past fews months fixing bugs and making improvements to ZoomIn.

Here’s a summary of what we’ve been working on:

New Functionality

• Activity Feed - Here you can see the last 20 actions by our members on ZoomIn.
• Popular places - This is where you can see the 10 most popular places, today, this week and of all time.
• GeoRSS - We’ve added GeoRSS feeds for the latest places, photos and comments . (For an example of what the GeoRSS feed looks like, have a look at this example on Google.)
• Nearby places - On the information page, you can find out what’s nearby your favourite places eg. Here’s whats nearby popular 3c bar.

Usability Improvements

We been make lots of improvements to the functionality on ZoomIn.

• We improved our default URL system so that now you can directly link to a map of an address or place or link to information about that address or place. eg. Map of Arrowtown and Information on Arrowtown.
• Search - We’ve made improvements to the search, so that it’s more accurate.
• Design - From your feedback, we’ve redesigned the map results page to fix a number of layout bugs and remove whitespace thus maximising the map. We’ve also added a new navigation slider to the map.
• Photos - We added bigger thumbnails on the information pages and user profile pages. We’ve also allowed users to change the default picture for a place.
• Enabled custom IFrame sizes for users who are embed maps on their web page or blogs.

And a whole raft of bug fixes. We’ve got a more new functionality and improvements in the wings that will be released soon.