Check it out - the website of a web designer/developer! :)

Howdy everyone.

I am a WordPress designer and developer, and I have recently (site is one month old) launched my website. It acts as a visible portfolio of my work as well as a place to list my WordPress services and tutorials.

Please feel free to roam around, check it out, and give me your feedback!

http://thomasgriffinmedia.com

Constructive criticism, please.

Thomas

 

Simple and Attractive design

 

Thanks for the compliment! Any others?

 

I think its great man, good job. I would assume this theme is custom from the ground up? everything was easy to find and site was very smooth. i really cant think of any 1 area where you need improvement. grats, you really do know your stuff (from what i can see)!

 

Yes, my site is built off of WordPress and the Thesis theme. Thesis acts more like a framework than a theme, and I've customized my whole site around it. It looks nothing like the original layout of Thesis.

Thanks for the compliments!

 

yea thanks, im going to consider using it as a framework for me as well. thanks, and best of luck to you!

 

You really should try it out!

 

Would you be interested in being sponsored?

 

your web site looks great except when i clicked on portfolio link it says page not found here is the url "http://thomasgriffinmedia.com/blog/2010/09/portfolio-item-1/"

 

Nice site buddy. Really impressive.

 

Thanks for the compliments!

@technoverma - Which link did you click on? I can't find the broken link on my pages.

 

I really like the look. Is that a Theme or one you modified? Pretty nice either way.

 

Good job @ valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.

But...

Your site could need some speed bost.

Google Page Speed score is only 76.

Suggestions from the big G are:

Leverage browser caching
Minify CSS
Parallelize downloads across hostnames
Serve static content from a cookieless domain
Combine images into CSS sprites
Combine external CSS
Combine external JavaScript
Optimize images
Remove query strings from static resources
Minify JavaScript
Serve resources from a consistent URL

Code (markup):

Your site could reach 90+ Google Page Speed score easily... I know how to achieve that.
Check my blog or gimme a PM if you need more informations.

 

@steelerguy26 - This is a modification of the Thesis theme for WordPress. You should check it out and consider using it.

@CSM - Thanks for the comments. As far as speed goes, I'm putting things into sprites right now. That was actually on my list of things to do today. I should be done with that tonight, which will take care of excessive parallel downloads and will reduce HTTP requests. As far as CSS and JS goes, those cannot be combined. I will minify CSS even more with W3TC as well.

As far as browser caching, not very practical with using a CDN, so I'll just have to live with that.

I should be able to get mid 80s with page speed..which would be good with me.

@sanr716 - thanks!

 

Thomas, I use W3TC and self-hosted FTP option (a cookieless domain).

Combined all CSS into 1 file and also combined all JS to 1 file. Improvement is great (I have 94 Google Page Speed score).
Browser Caching IS practical with a CDN.

 

I'm not sure if a cookieless domain would be possible. Reason being is that I have everything pointing to thomasgriffinmedia.com, and those cookies will get passed to any subdomains listed underneath it (in this case cdn.thomasgriffinmedia.com). Not sure if setting www.thomasgriffinmedia.com will hurt anything..I may give it a try. At any rate, doing it that way would necessarily remove cookies from the cdn files.

I'm talking with my webhost company to modify the httpd.conf file so I can combine JS and CSS with W3TC. I need to have a directive changed in order for it to work. Otherwise, the files don't combine and minify correctly. (Need the AllowOverride All directive)

Browser caching practical with a CDN? Explain that one to me cause I don't quite get why you would want to do that. :-P

 

Well, you should know that mod_expires and adding some directives to the .htaccess are enough to enable browser caching.

We have set up our own "CDN" (self-hosted ftp, with some cookieless domains) and it works very well. I am using it for blogs and for commercial sites. Even minifying/combining JS/CSS with W3TC is no problem. I am just talking about the static content (JS/CSS/images).

It's all about speed, I made a site that has 98/100 and YSlow 100.

Server location is germany (at hetzner.de), if you need some space I could offer you some Megs

 

Got browser caching to work. Now I just need to get everything minified, combined and work towards a cookieless domain. Then I will be set.

 

If you need some help regarding cookieless domain send me a PM

 

Oh by the way... memcache daemon and xcache module would be one of the best options for caching data/text