PC Site

1 Dec 2009

This post was last updated on June 2010, it may be out of date or inaccurate.

PC Site is a computer and antivirus website where users can compare and read reviews on different products

While being the lead front-end developer at Net Media Planet I was in charge of implementing a computer and software site which allowed users to compare products before buying them and read reviews, news and guides on the page products and others.

The framework/CMS

In my opinion, WordPress is the best choice for this kind of projects, at first look it’s just another blog engine but it is very optimized and simple to start coding on it while providing the best Administration Panel I’ve ever seen and this was a must since 3 online content editors where going to update the site daily. It also has a nice and friendly framework to work with.

I implemented the whole front-end and back-end of the site in a way that was very scalable (the website has changed A LOT since the “go live”), converting itinto a full featured website.

Implementation

Along with a graphic designer we implemented the first version of PC Site ready for production in barely 6 weeks from planning to being published in which I spend no more than 3 weeks to develop.

Technologies and languages

To develop PC Site I have used XHTML and CSS, JavaScript/jQuery and AJAX, PHP5 with MySQL, Apache scripting with some modules, regular expressions and microformats.

The site URLs are all friendly to help in SEO and the user.

Further investigation has been done regarding SEO and we have been running usability tests frequently as well as multivariation tests.

Product listing API

The back-end department coded a really nice private API for me to use through JSON calls that enabled me to gather the information I needed to display in the product listing pages.

JavaScript and AJAX

The site has a lot of hand made JavaScript progressive enhancements that help the user to navigate nicely. The scripts have all been tested under JSLint (JS Code Quality tool) to keep the code as optimized, fast and good as possible.

Doing some benchmarking studies I determined that the whole site JavaScript takes between 40 and 100ms in Firefox so it is really fast. The product search works completely through AJAX (still being search engine friendly) which is great for loading times.

The site also has search tools using jQuery UI to add cool range sliders:

Optimization

We tested the site with their main competitors in the country and PC Site UK was the fastest and most optimized website by far.

Since PC Site is still very young, we needed to be above the average to come to the surface of SERP (search engine result pages) so we studied and improved the website with every little tweak available to meet the best SEO practices and be Google Caffeine ready.

The site also complies with the W3C standards as well as implementing some graceful degradation for IE6 users.

Some of the SEO techniques used in this site are:

  • CSS and JavaScript file combination and minify
  • HTML, CSS and JavaScript compression
  • Custom cache expiration dates for each file type
  • DNS minimized
  • Image optimization
  • Use of CSS Sprite maps
  • CSS and HTML code optimization to avoid “divitis” and keep good practices above all
  • …plus lots and lots of other tweaks

Test resultsThe Website Grade for pc-site.co.uk

  • Google Page Speed: 80 out of 100
    (would be more if IE6 didn’t exist!)
  • YSlow (from Yahoo): Grade A (95 out of 100)
  • Website Grader: 89 out of 100

Results

After only a few months the site started appearing in first result pages and it reached PR2. Google also indexed some PC Site sitemaps and they now appear in the results. Thanks to microformats, the results for reviews also display additional information (rating in stars and the name of the author).

The site also does a lot of SEM and started being profitable even before than expected.

Visit the site at: http://www.pc-site.co.uk

               
       

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