Bad design

Paul McGowan said I'll keep doing what I can and thanks for the help. I contacted our current webmaster who helped finish the website design and in response to your comments about bandwidth and too many style sheets here was his response:

He has a good point. It would be a lot of work. I've been band-aiding a shaky foundation built by people who, frankly, had no business coding a WordPress site. There are a lot of dependencies, including numerous plugins (many of which load their own CSS and JS files). I attempted to combine the JS and CSS files with a plugin I've used before, but it's not working. I can certainly try an alternate aproach to combine many (but not most) of the CSS and JS files to reduce some of the bandwidth, but beyond that, we get diminishing returns without going back to the drawing board.

At this moment there is no reason to combine and minify CSS and JS files. In the post above I mentioned mod_pagespeed, that can do that automatically.

What needs to be done right now is to minify the features.

Here’s another example of unnecessary features that should be removed. I do not think that anybody cares if a thread is being followed, watched (looks like duplicate features already), has attachments and thumbs up/down. Each “feature” takes at least at least three files (CSS + JS + Image) and makes several SQL queries per thread. Also, additional small icons “break” the design and make it less tight, readable and intuitive.

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