Redesign and upgrades at Pharmalot.com

Thanks to the hard work of Hassan Hodges, we launched a redesign and a few upgrades at our pharmaceutical industry news site Pharmalot over the weekend. The changes focused on a few key areas, and they were geared toward improving the overall experience for the site’s growing community of users:

Connections
>Promotion for Pharmalot’s Facebook page.
>Prominent links to Pharmalot’s Twitter stream, RSS feeds, and email subscriptions.

Search engine optimization
>Reduced duplicate content.
>Better search terms to organize content.
>Better content in those oh-so-important H1 and H2 fields.

Performance
>Reduced homepage HTML size from 67KB to 46KB.
>15% fewer requests for external files.
>25% fewer database calls to generate a page.
>Total homepage load reduced from 266KB to 188KB.
>Total load time cut in half from 3.7 to 1.9 seconds. Individual results will vary, but we’re processing fewer components on the back end and serving everything in a leaner way.

Printing
>Better support for printing pages via a print stylesheet. (This was our most requested new feature.)

We’ll keep rolling out improvements and responding to suggestions from users. If you have any thoughts about how we can make the site better, please drop a line here or in the comments below. You can also see the archived Cover It Live chat Hassan held today with users on the site. And of course Ed Silverman, the grand poobah of Pharmalot, always welcomes your input.