It looks really good! Good job, I will say this Tech Blogs take a lot of work. But you have a great start! Congrats on it. I would give it 6.5 for design, this is because it uses a wordpress template that anyone could use 7.5 for content - Good Job 6 - for originality 10 - for effort! Overall base score of 7 - good job.
Painfully slow loading, everything kind-of feels slapped in there any-old-way much akin to what I hate about Google+... Your light grey text has severe usability issues in both size and contrasts, and likewise the white-on-blue is really dancing the edge of usability minimums. From a code standpoint it reeks of scripttardery -- 15 separate scripts totally almost half a megabyte "FOR WHAT?!?", 9 separate CSS files totalling larger than the entire codebase for such a simple page should be, and the 64k of markup to deliver 4.5k of plaintext and two dozen content images is easily anywhere from four to five times as much as should be used for such a simple layout. Admittedly, 99% of that code bloat is the idiotic halfwit mouth-breathing bullshit that turdpress saddles you with, like: <ul id="menu-menu-1" class="menu clearfix"><li id="menu-item-295" class="menu-item menu-item-type-taxonomy menu-item-object-category menu-item-295"><a href="http://techtidy.com/category/tech-news/">Tech News</a></li> Code (markup): The poster child for "I canz haz intarnets" development and entirely what one can come to expect from slapping together off the shelf parts like turdpress together and blindly hoping it will make a website. It will -- but said site will be indexed poorly, have a high number of bounces from people who can't use it or are too impatient to wait for it, and in general be stuck in "also ran" status for most if not all of it's brief existence. I award you no points, and may...
Load speed was fine at this time (3:54 AM EST). http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/cy0FEa/http://techtidy.com It looks like you are trying to reach an American audience but your English skills are not perfect. People see that right away and it does not make a good impression. Otherwise, the site looks nice.
Love how some folks seem to think that pingdom's times have anything to do with reality given the total fiction their ping times and effectively impossible multiple requests are. Seriously, look at that waterfall -- do you SEE a problem there? (like more than 8 requests at once which is physically impossible in 90%+ of browsers?) -- of course that they are effectively not even loading some files (like the WOFF's) skews it too. 87 files by their count? That's real world minimum 8 seconds overhead on firstload, real world average of 16 seconds, and worst case scenario of 80 seconds or more JUST in handshaking in a real browser with a real connection... REGARDLESS of the actual speed of the connection or file sizes. Again, real world average is 200ms on first-load for every file past the first eight. Something pingdom's magical fantasyland connection speed and even bigger fantasy of two dozen simultaneous connections fails to reflect.
Total load time for me right now from click to render is 3.84 seconds in Firefox, 3.62 seconds in Google Chrome. That is longer than the Pingdom time, but that test was done early in the morning when traffic is lower than now. I got click to render load in 3.84 seconds. Yes, that is a lot of requests and no, I would not want that many requests on a site of mine. But that is not a bad load time, especially considering the large amount of requests. It is not slow, not where I am, not per the Pingdom test. It may have been slower earlier. It is also a holiday. I will check again later and again later this week.
While for me it's ten times that -- and 80% of that load time is handshaking. It's 7 and some change when the cache is primed... though I'm getting a LOT less files reported than PingDOM is seeing, and a far LARGER page size? Eight seconds for the scripting alone and that's ALL handshaking. 12 seconds could be shaved off that just by combining the scripts and CSS into monolithic files ALONE. You can't trust your own numbers, waterfalls or those of "magic super-servers" like pingdom to be representative of what most visitors will get -- you have to use "the math". I know that word -- MATH -- scares the drooling halfwits sleazing out websites any old way, but the MATH is that for each file past the first eight you should "plan" on it taking 200ms per file, and worst case it could be one second or more... -- so with the 55 files FF's document inspector is reporting that's eight seconds "average" and almost a minute worst case. With the 78 files pingdom reports that's 14 seconds to a minute and a half... Hmm... network profiling says 55 fils, Web developer toolbar says 65 files, pingdom says 78? Lovely. Means some sort of stupid scripttardery is likely pissing on it as well. Bottom line on a cache-empty first-load if you're getting less than 14 seconds, you're either looking at your cached time instead of first-load, or magically happen to be "sitting on top of the server" in terms of the number of hops and ping-time to their hosting... and really anything more than ten seconds is likely to make a large number of visitors bounce thinking the site is broken.
techtidy.com. On a first load with nothing cached it loaded for me at the times I wrote above. I will check again using both Firefox and Google Chrome: Firefox: 4.13 seconds, 86 requests Chrome: 2.83 seconds, 87 requests Maybe others can chime in.
I'd say you're likely just lucky enough to be sitting on top of a major pipe or spitting distance from where said site is hosted. It's the easiest explanation. I'm in Keene, NH stuck with Time Warner as the only realistic option -- my average ping time to 90%+ of the world is 500ms; meaning EACH handshake is a second and a half so the 'average' here is more like 600ms instead of the 200ms average; and there is NO foreseeable future where it's any better, AND I've got one of the BETTER ISP choices for ~50 miles. Large swaths of America more than 30 miles from a major city is in the same boat -- much less places like northern NH or major parts of the Dakota's where they're JUST getting 3m/512k at $60/mo. Hell, my connection is five times FASTER than what most all my neighbors have. :/ Again, you can't trust your own numbers -- you have to do the math... and basically the math says if you have more than 32 separate files on the page, you're doing it all wrong! No matter how many scripttards, artsy-fartsy PSD jockeys and people sleazing together frameworks any old way might want it to be otherwise... -- As a rule of thumb unless it's something like a gallery of thumbs I don't allow more than 24 files on a single page EVER! Though what are you using to pull those numbers? Your FF number I can't find anything like it in FF so... What's FF's performance monitor telling you?
There is a fiber optic cable a few hundred feet from where I am, but I do not think my broadband provider is using it. $20 a month 12 mbs DSL when bundled with home phone is what I am on. It's a site hosted on GoDaddy and it is several states away from me. F12 in Firefox to get to Developer Tools, click on the Network tab. Click the tab and all that before you load the page because then you won't have anything cached. Google Chrome is pretty much the same. I just checked again. Loads for techtidy.com 3 - 4 seconds in both Firefox and Chrome. I also timed it with a timer. What you say about slow internet connections is valid. Not everyone is on broadband. Keeping your file requests low is always a smart goal. The local newspaper's website has 742 requests. How's that for bloat?
Hasn't prevented caching in two years, so unless you are running a outdated version (pre-24)... F12, Network tab, hit the clock looking button in the list item near the text "start performance analysis" to perform the pie chart style performance evaluation. WAY more accurate than trying to dupe the waterfall into being uncached. You should get two pie-charts, one for cached, and one for uncached, both looking like the image I included above. Browsers are getting WAY harder to "trick" into giving you uncached values. Mostly I suspect they don't want you to know what total **** all this new **** actually is...