Step 1 - Putting down the foundation - customizing the Joomla! CMS

Like I mentioned in previous posts, I'll be using Joomla! as my CMS. I've done a fresh installation of Joomla! and started customizing the site to fit what I want the site to look like.

First I'm going to enter all the features that my site uses then I'll work on the aesthetics. Earlier, my thought was to use Ajax to speed up the load time of the site, but now I'm thinking having all the deals preloaded might be better idea since there will be more keywords matched for Google.

Is it worth a faster page load time for less keywords indexed by Google?

The size of the homepage is constantly in flux. As of right now, the size of the HTML only is 99.76KB. That's very big and the images (which also varies widely) adds another 165.39KB. In total, the homepage is 276.7KB (including CSS and JS files). That would be nearly a minute of load time for 56K dial-up users and 17.49 seconds for ISDN (128K).
[source: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/]

Clearly, my site needs to get lean! Though I want to have more keywords in my page, I'm going to have to do with just the keywords in the titles. My best estimate to the ideal web page size is 100KB for a site like mine. Mother of all Deals is an informational site that people come and want to see many deals at once so I can't have a homepage at just 30KB which would probably be closer to the ideal for a normal site.

I'm going to be using Ajax to load the deals on request.

You can track my progress on my development site at http://dev.motherofalldeals.com