The other day, in the web design forums, the topic of a website’s page performance affecting SEO rankings came up. A member posted several points regarding the subject and several tips you could employ to help boost your website’s load times. With quicker load times comes happier visitors and, hopefully, better search engine rankings.

Over the following days, during my casual internet browsing, an excellent article on SmashingMagazine discussed exactly this topic, in more detail.

Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation.

In your case, annoying a few users wouldn’t be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you’d better be snappy in delivering it. For years, Hollywood movies showed us how fast the Internet was: time to make that a reality.

Even if you don’t have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are consuming the Web nowadays less with fat connections and massive computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Waiting for a slow website to load on a mobile phone is doubly annoying because the user is usually already in a hurry and is paying by the byte or second. It’s 1997 all over again.

The article outlines several important factors in website page performance and the effects it may have on your SEO rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I hope you find it helpful.

I’m debating writing several in-depth articles regarding this topic and many others, what do you think? Would you read them?

Problem/Symptom:

Adobe’s new CS3 (Photoshop and Illustrator mostly) experiences slow performance and lagging when opening or creating files regardless of size or type.

Solution:

Check your printers. this error is related to the default printer and print service. If you have an offline or unconnected printer, this is most likely your issue. Remove any offline or old/duplicate references to networked printers. If the printer is timing out, you will experience lag in Photoshop and Illustrator even on fast systems.

My Personal Experience: After installing the Adobe Photoshop CS3 Trial and using it for a little bit, I noticed it bogging very badly whenever I would create a new image or open an existing file of any type or size. After searching around for a while, I caught wind of it being printer related, more specifically the printspooler service in windows. I had recently moved and not hooked up one of my networked printers. After removing the offline printers (and printer that was trying to connect but would time-out) Photoshop opened files and created new ones with a snap!! I’m very glad to have resolved this issue, it was getting very annoying having Photoshop lag on a Dual Core system running 4gb of DDR2 on a Rapter! Anyways, glad to have it cleared up! For anyone out there having this same issue, check your default printer and also remove any offline printers or ones that cannot connect!

Note: If you decide to repost this solution on your site, please reference my post above by linking to me somewhere on your page. Thanks!!! Hope this information helps!

UPDATE: If you missed this one, the ability to view PSD files in Windows Explorer is always nice!