Help with designing and writing a program
 

Hey everybody. I've got a big project to start soon and was wondering if anyone could help me with kind of starting it and some design phase elements. Basically I need to make a program in C# that can analyze the efficiency of websites. This means making a windows application in which a user can input a website and then have the program time how long it takes for the website to load. Optional features would be the ability to have the program analyze the HTML, and JavaScript files to analyze things such as the size of images, image file formats, and other various objects within the HTML and JavaScript. I am a little worried because there are basically no code examples to assist me writing this program and I am having a very hard time finding resources to help me complete this project. I was just wondering if anyone could give me some advice on how to write this program? Perhaps suggest some books or websites that would be helpful? Or some C# objects that would be useful in checking out? I would appreciate anyone's advice. Thank you :icon_razz:

Re: Help with designing and writing a program
 

How do you define 'efficiency'? Using flat load time is not appropriate, as this doesn't take into account the relative size of pages. For example, page A takes two seconds to load, while page B takes five seconds- but page B has ten times the content, measured in bytes. Obviously, page B loads at a faster rate, so which is more efficient?

You can take all the objective measurements you like, such as page size, ratio of tags/comments to 'actual' content, number and size of images, and so forth. However, what makes a site efficient is how well the material is presented, taking into account its target audience. Lots of Flash animations aren't bad for little kids, since many kids are attracted to that sort of thing, but what if it's a professional adult? How do the color schemes attract or repel visitors? If you've got even a moderate amount of information, is it organized in such a manner that someone can quickly and easily find what they're looking for, or do they need to visit every page of your site until they do? Few if any of these things can be objectively measured. You need to get the opinions of living, breathing people.

Re: Help with designing and writing a program
 

Plus you'll get different results depending on what hardware the machine has that is requesting it. A workstation will get better results at loading documents and text and a gaming pc will likely get better results when loading graphical content.