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Patrick bootstrapped himself out of his previous full-time programming job, replacing his salary and then some, in single-digit hours per week, using the OLD DESIGN.

You gave a numbered list of good suggestions and wrote the kernel of a detailed, thoughtful comment, but sabotaged it with poor framing and assumptions. I don't care or anything, but for your benefit: this is a nerdly inclination that will serve you very, very poorly in your professional career. HN often has the opposite problem from your comment (a bias towards being "right" even when we're not "correct", such as in civil liberties stories); here, you're "correct" but not "right", since adoption of all your recommendations is unlikely to change the bottom line for Patrick at all.

One consultant to (I presume) another: my suggestion for next time: either:

(a) (expensively) do exhaustive research so you can frame your high-level assessment and recommendations in the context of someone's business (ie, expend the effort to make sure you're both correct and right), or

(b) (much simpler) develop a habit of writing your comments in a neutral, helpful tone, so that you can be correct without having to be right at all.

By the way, I feel comfortable writing this comment because I have oh my God exactly the same problem with my comments. Look at me on a crypto thread sometime.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "correct without having to be write" Within the context of the parent post?

Is this a matter of the problems pointed out are "correct" technically, but they may or may not be the "right" thing to spend time on?

Just in case the parent doesn't respond

"Is this a matter of the problems pointed out are "correct" technically, but they may or may not be the "right" thing to spend time on?"

I'm pretty sure you've already got it, this sounds like it. I would only add that a conscientious person checks whether their comment is adding to the conversation (not anxiously; just subconsciously, as a habit). The parent to your comment is saying that if you're 'correct' you're in the clear that way.

I think the thing about being "right" is that if you're right (i.e. your addressee is wrong) you have enough social capital to take that tone with somebody. If you're wrong and you take up an 'I'm right' tone, you come off like you don't care about thinking things through before you make an investment of your time.

He's "correct" in that all his recommendations seem valid. Ceteris paribus, Patrick should adopt them.

He's not "right", though, because adopting any of these recommendations would cost anywhere from tens- to thousands- of dollars, and would be unlikely in the aggregate, even if all of them were adopted, to make Patrick one additional dollar.

to your point, the problem isn't so much pointing out small design errors, but it's being a dick when pointing out small design errors. the design may not be pixel perfect but it basically prints money with no effort. it doesn't suck when it comes to what actually matters, and that is making sales.

I apologize from Patrick and the readers if my comment made more harm than good. That wasn't my intent. Sometimes I'm a bit of an "asshole", and I have to acknowledge that. I thank you for taking the time to correct that side of me.

Getting the tone of a message board comment doesn't make you an asshole.

I hope.

My designer is totally blameless for any implementation infelicities: I have ultimate control over that and hack the heck out of his HTML/CSS before it hits my pages.

Other parts are the way they are simply because, well, we have very different standards for things which should delay shipping. Bits are cheap, my time is expensive, optimizing for bits saved (on my cute little re-demoted-to-hobby project, no less) seems like a poor idea.

Similarly, failure to achieve pixel perfection of the price display in Australian dollars is not exactly the kind of thing that would scare me away from a design. You know what would terrify me? "It looks nice -- women generally hate it." That would cause the business to fold like an origami crane. Happily, it doesn't seem to have that problem.

I'm generally happy to get feedback, even negative feedback, but as one professional to another your feedback doesn't leave me with the impression "Tie a string around my finger to address this later" because it does not persuasively implicate anything I really care about.

One could argue that it affects your Google organic search traffic. The better your HTML, and lighter your Javascript, the more likely the mighty Google will send people to you.

There might be something to this. The site is #6 for "bingo cards" search on google for me.

For whatever it's worth: Patrick's original strategy for ranking (and perhaps still the strategy that accounts for most of his revenue) isn't the Google search [bingo cards]. It's 1000 closely related but technologically distinct searches.

Patrick, you're the expert here on Google traffic direction: are any of these changes likely to impact your ranking?

I heard that alot, but haven't actually seen that proven yet.

It's a very good excuse to force people on improving their HTML and website speed, but I still would like to see the impact of the Google organic results after only speed improvement and bad HTML fixes.

On a tangential note: Though the different alignment of the AUD amount wouldn't even register on my radar - I'm 99% sure the exchange rate you're using _will_ be significant for most of your target market. The AUD has been trading above the USD for many months now - and _everybody_ here who buys _anything_ online knows that.

http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert/?Amount=29.95&From=USD&...

It might be worth revisiting those non-USD prices...

Not sure if this is the case or not, but certain templating systems make it really hard to remove extra whitespace/lines (I'm looking at you Jinja2) and they get added when you use standard templating stuff like "if/then" statements.

Removing them after the fact with a HTML tidier would work, or you could just not care and let gzip handle the compression.

> Not sure if this is the case or not, but certain templating systems make it really hard to remove extra whitespace/lines (I'm looking at you Jinja2)

Jinja2 is a generic templating engine, and as such can't make assumptions about relevance of whitespace.

However, writing an extension on top of it isn't hard, and mitsuhiko has written an extension to do that.

https://github.com/mitsuhiko/jinja2-htmlcompress

Nice! Going to integrate this into my blogofile setup so that I can output nicer HTML!

> 2- Removes unnecessary space (empty lines and spaces). Why the extra bits?

The extra whitespaces are most probably the template output. If he is using erb, erb is a generic template and doesn't make assumptions about relevance of whitespace. If you are optimizing by hand, you will still have all the newlines and indents in the output.

Some people use minifiers, most people don't care. Almost all servers and clients speak gzip, and the extra overhead is so low on the list of things to optimize that it probably isn't even on the list.

> 3- JavaScript, I see that you are loading a good chunk of JavaScript in the HEAD and you are loading a bunch of it in the end. For example the Amazon JS file (http://s3.amazonaws.com/new.cetrk.com/pages/scripts/0004/737...) is certainly not usable, and is yet a whole HTTP request.

Again, I am taking a guess. layout.html.erb yields under body, and head and scripts are same for all pages. Now patio11 can hand include just the needed scripts on every page, but he chose to include all scripts on all pages. This isn't something the designer controls.

> 2- http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2777218/shot2.png

That menu change really looks weird.

Maybe Patrick could do a A/B test on the new version of the site vs. the highly optimized version of the new site (do even more than you suggested, there is a lot more possible if you start searching) and see if it makes any difference. That could be really interesting.

I doubt he has the time and 'itch' right now, though.