Southeastern Mills has a good thing going, but their last website was holding them back. They needed an online space where they could shine and a small team at Erwin Penland came through for them.

The weeks leading up to development kickoff I was studying web performance. A performance budget sounded less like a trend and more like the right way to go about a project so I planned on following one on the next project I worked on. Turns out that the next project I worked on was pretty much already designed by the time I was told about it so I took what they gave me and set performance goals for myself, taking into account competition and nature of the design. The design is I’m a front-end programmer with design chops and availability–what’s not to like? in imagery and includes videos hosted at Vimeo. I knew that would be a pain point performance-wise so I poured a lot of attention into efficient assets (No div-itis, modular CSS, sprinklings of Javascript, etc.).

I ran web page tests on the two largest competitors and set my goals to have a 20% smaller homepage, lower speed index, and faster load.

Of course, as it turns out, once again, front-end work worth talking about is hard and adding performance consideration to the mix just takes it to another level. Every decision was important.

Given the nature of a site like this, and the amount of people that may end up working on it, and the likelihood that it won’t always be me, and the fact that there was no build-process, I decided to keep things pretty conventional. I compressed images, did a couple lazy-load tricks when Javascript is available, AJAXed hidden content in, and used SVG where I could.

* Excluding a 28.8mb hero video…