Cost Savings of Using CSS

thought y'all might be interested in this, given the conversation
that's been going about regarding the positive economics of 
businesses adopting css. this is one of the best that i've seen,
particularly for large or highly-trafficed websites.

it's taken from the web design list http://webdesign-L.com/

cheers,

anthony

anthony baker  | aim: meadowlark07
t: 415.441.6819  | f: 415.276.9388 
mailto:anthony@designforpeople.org 


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Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 10:50:33 -0500
From: jason perkins <jason@somebodydial911.com>
Subject: [WD]: economist's cost savings [was: google's cost savings]
Message-ID: <EF41420E-94E5-11D6-A600-0003936A1B08@somebodydial911.com>

On Thursday, July 11, 2002, at 01:06 , Chris Lott wrote:

> The best I can find for stats is:
> http://www.search-engine-optimization-
> strategies.net/search-engine-statistic
> s/google-statistics.html -- with 150 million searches per day, saving 
> even a
> fraction of a K in download time saves a whole lot of bandwidth. But I
> suspect if that were really the reason for using short variable names, 
> they
> would optimize in many other ways that they are not on their pages. The
> short variable names make for a shorter URL, which is probably more 
> useful.

i should've specified that the article that i was referring to had 
talked about the javascript variable names, ie:

<!--
function sf(){document.f.q.focus();}
function c(p){var f=document.f;if (f.action) {f.action = 
'http://'+p;f.submit();return false;}return true;}
// -->

where i was headed with this was that by using css instead of <font> 
tags on the economist website, they'd wind up saving significant amounts 
of bandwidth. kevin smith and i were chatting about this yesterday and 
come up with the following: assuming that they had 12 million visitors 
per month (david w. said that if 1% of his users were on NN4x, that'd be 
120,000 page views per month.) and replacing all of the current font 
tags with an external style sheet with a size of appr 2k, then their 
monthly cost savings in bandwidth is 120 gigs/month. that's without 
tightening up the js, using more css throughout the site, etc. this also 
ignores caching of the external style sheet for repeat visitors.

the css replacement would work for nn 4 that had js enabled. those that 
didn't could be redirected to a page that did make use of the font tag. 
based on 10% of the economists visitors using nn 4 and appr 13% of the 
general surfer not having js enabled, that would come out to 156k 
visitors/month who were redirected to the <font> laden page which would 
be 3 gigs that would still have to be transferred and lowering the 
savings to 117 gigs/month.

i don't know how much they're paying for bandwidth, or how much time it 
would take to maintain two versions of the same page (i'm assuming that 
the cms that's used there would make this easier to implement and 
maintain), but figuring those out would give an idea of how much cost 
savings can be achieved using this (limited) use of css. and it's 
interesting that something as simple as this can still result in a 6% 
decrease in the amount of bandwidth that you're using to xfer one page.


- --
:: jason perkins
:: url -> www.somebodydial911.com

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in
human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
  -Mitch Ratcliffe, Technology Review, April 1992

Received on Friday, 12 July 2002 05:46:51 UTC