In addition to the multilingual abilities of Maneno, one of the big things we talk about is the low bandwidth aspects to the site and the fact you can set varying levels of bandwidth throttling. To date, this function required that you join the site in order to use it as it is part of a member's profile. While we still recommend that people join to take advantage of various site features, we've now opened up bandwidth selection to anyone who visits the site to try out or use while reading the site. From the home page or any other top level page, you will now see on the right, a Connection Speed selector. Feel free to play around with it and see what we've done with the site to make it as light as possible depending on your needs.
If you try out each setting and analyze it with something like the Page Speed analyzer from Google, you will get results similar to these:
As you can see, the number of elements on a page (the left column) decreases with the actual size of the page (the right column). The last two settings of 'Slow' and 'Very Slow' might not seem all that different, but these settings make a very big difference when you are a member and access other areas of the site. But note that at the lowest setting our home page is a mere 9.4kb to download!
In the center column of this chart you will see that we are big fans of compressing the site to make it even smaller before you view it. This helps us to make the site anywhere from 50% to 70% smaller to download.
You will also notice that we've changed the home page a little bit. We've worked to make elements of more importance have a greater visual impact. We also worked to get more data on the page, while giving it a visual appearance that is lighter overall.
In addition to this, all language selectors have been moved up to the top of the screen for all top level, blog, and hosted blog pages. It clears up a bit of space, gives you the full name of each language in an easier format to select from, and most importantly, it gives us more space to add more language as we get them available.
We hope you like all the changes!
