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A whopping 804 KB per page is comprised of images. Three years ago, images comprised just 372 KB of a page’s total payload.

images are one of the single greatest impediments to front-end performance. All too often, they’re either in the wrong format or they’re uncompressed or they’re not optimized to load progressively — or all of the above.

Today, 38% of pages use Flash, compared to 52% in 2010. This is a good thing. Nothing against Flash, per se, but if Apple has no plans ever to support it, its obsolescence is inevitable in our increasingly mobile-first world.

use of custom fonts has exploded — from 1% in 2010 to 33% today.

But custom fonts have a dark side: they can incur a significant performance penalty.

These days, images on the web have to work hard. They need to be high-res enough to satisfy users with retina displays, and they also need to be small enough in size that they don’t blow your mobile data cap in one fell swoop. Responsive web design attempts to navigate this tricky terrain, with varying degrees of success.

Google published findings, based on Google Analytics data, which suggest that load times have gotten marginally faster for desktop users, and up to 30% faster for mobile users.

Here at Strangeloop/Radware, we’ve found the opposite. Using WebPagetest, we’ve been testing the same 2,000 top Alexa-ranked ecommerce sites since 2010, and our data tells us that top ecommerce pages have gotten 22% slower in the past year.

This quick-and-dirty case study illustrates how network speed doesn’t directly correlate to load time. For example, download bandwidth increases 333% from DSL (1.5Mbps) to cable (5Mbps), yet the performance gain is only 12%.

Move scripts to the bottom of the page

It’s better to move scripts from the top to as low in the page as possible. One reason is to enable progressive rendering, but another is to achieve greater download parallelization.

Make JavaScript and CSS external

If users on your site have multiple page views per session and many of your pages re-use the same scripts and stylesheets, you could potentially benefit from cached external files. Pages that have few (perhaps only one) page view per session may find that inlining JavaScript and CSS results in faster end-user response times.

Reduce DNS lookups

Minify JavaScript

In addition to minifying external scripts, you can also minify inlined script blocks. Even if you’re already gzipping your scripts, minifying them will still reduce the size by at least 5%.

On a desktop, only 20% of the time it takes to display a Web page comes from downloading files. The rest of the time is spent processing HTTP requests and loading style sheets, script files and images. It takes even longer on a smartphone because its CPU, memory and cache size are much smaller than a desktop’s.

Having a fast website is all about making the hard decisions and getting rid of what’s not at the core of your experience. If it doesn’t add a lot of value, remove it.

Reduce DependenciesFewer files to download means fewer HTTP requests and faster loading times. Reduce Image DimensionsOn top of the extra download time, precious processing power and memory are used to resize high-resolution images. Reduce Client-Side ProcessingRethinking the use of JavaScript and keeping it to a minimum are best.

the great storyteller takes time to understand what his listeners know about, care about, and want to hear. Then he crafts the essential elements of the story so that they elegantly resonate with those needs, starting where the listeners are and bringing them along on a satisfying emotional journey.

a great story is never fully predictable through foresight—but it’s projectable through hindsight.

LMU’s Teri Schwartz picked up on Hodge’s idea: “Make the ‘I’ in your story become ‘we,’ so the whole tribe or community can come together and unite behind your experience and the idea it embodies.”

The context of the telling is always a part of the story

Great storytellers prepare obsessively

At the same time, the great storyteller is flexible enough to drop the script and improvise when the situation calls for it. Actually, intensive preparation and improvising are two sides of the same coin. If you know your story well, you can riff on it without losing the thread or the focus.

Most of the throng changed from true believers to thoughtful skeptics in just a few moments.

Orchestrate emotional responses effectively, and you actually transfer proprietorship of the story to the listener, making him an advocate who will power the viral marketing of your message.

the job of the teller is to capture his mission in a story that evokes powerful emotions and thereby wins the assent and support of his listeners

This explains the passion that great storytellers exude. They infuse their stories with meaning because they really believe in the mission

When truth to the mission conflicts with truth to the audience, truth to the mission should win out

At the end of the day, words and ideas presented in a way that engages listeners’ emotions are what carry stories

it isn’t special effects or the 0’s and 1’s of the digital revolution that matter most—it’s the oohs and aahs that the storyteller evokes from an audience

Colin Callender, president of HBO Films, noted that several of HBO’s most acclaimed productions are ones that audience pretesting marked as losers.

the ability to articulate your story or that of your company is crucial in almost every phase of enterprise management. It works all along the business food chain: A great salesperson knows how to tell a story in which the product is the hero. A successful line manager can rally the team to extraordinary efforts through a story that shows how short-term sacrifice leads to long-term success. An effective CEO uses an emotional narrative about the company’s mission to attract investors and partners, to set lofty goals, and to inspire employees.

The second wave: The Iceberg

We will need to adopt new skills. Data modeling, algorithm design, voice scripting, and gesture design need to become common design practices.

The third wave: Organic Products

Today, a design team delivers a production-ready thing, something finished and ready for manufacturing and consumption. Tomorrow's designer must be prepared to ride "shotgun" with the customer and the product for the life of that product, perhaps helping to grow and adapt the product over time.

"Design is how it works."

The "it" of that quote becomes not only the experience of a single device but a composite experience made up of a multitude of touch points, defined by not only what we can see and touch but by an increasingly unseen and diverse set of features. The "it" is no longer a fixed static thing, but a growing, evolving experience that ultimately can begin to mirror our ideas of life itself--and the discipline of design must grow and evolve along with it.