Although web standards-based websites can scale effectively—and basic CSS will give you basic results—there are considerations and obstacles that high traffic websites must face to keep your development and hosting costs to a minimum. There are many tips and tricks, as well as down-to-earth best practice information, to make sure that everything runs quickly and efficiently with the minimum amount of fuss or developer intervention. Targeted at "high traffic" websites—those receiving over 10,000 unique visitors a day—
Pro CSS for High Traffic Websites gives you inside information from the professionals on how to get the most out of your web development team.
The book covers the development processes required to smoothly set up an easy-to-maintain CSS framework across a large-volume website and to keep the code reusable and modular. It also looks at the business challenges of keeping branding consistent across a major website and sustaining performance at a premium level through traffic spikes and across all browsers. Defensive coding is considered for sites with third-party code or advertising requirements. It also covers keeping CSS accessible for all viewers, and examines some advanced dynamic CSS techniques.
Antony Kennedy is currently describing himself as a lead front-end engineer. That means he makes websites work under the hood with JavaScript and keeps them friendly and functional, with animated Ajax interfaces. He has worked on many high traffic sites for companies such as Apple, the BBC, BSkyB and Channel4. He is an advocate of good processes and agile development and blogs about these and web development on his blog Zeroed and Noughted (http://zeroedandnoughted.com/). He has been working in web and development technologies for over 13 years and remembers Internet Explorer 3 and Xara 3D fondly. He started his career doing IT support in Hastings, U.K., and has since been involved in the entire software development lifecycle, from design and conception to support and warranty. He particularly enjoys fixing broken processes and demonstrating that you can be agile in a waterfall business environment. He learns by doing things that he doesn t know how to do. He is the managing director of a small business called Silver Squid (http://www.silversquid.com). He lives in a half-finished house in northeast London and complains about it a lot while being taught how to use a Nintendo DS by his daughter, Talia, and his son, Felix. He can t cook (except for sushi and pot noodles) and is very difficult to buy presents for.
