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03-10-2005, 11:02 AM
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#1 |
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Member (5 bit)
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 22
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Website loading time
hello all, I am kind of new to webpage building. It's more a less a hobby. I was wondering if someone could take a look at my sites and tell me of any tricks or things I can do to make the pages load faster without compromising my background music and image/graphics quality. My website hosting is through eHostPros.com and I build my pages through WebpageMaker. Any advice and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks, Lefty Webmaster - ColleenMcGarry.com http://www.columbia.colleenmcgarry.com http://www.911.colleenmcgarry.com http://www.enduringfreedom.colleenmcgarry.com http://www.iraqifreedom.colleenmcgarry.com |
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03-10-2005, 01:27 PM
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#2 |
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Staff
Premium Member
Join Date: Jul 1999
Location: Arlington, TN
Posts: 5,538
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The last two sites in particular are very slow loading, in the 50-60 seconds timeframe on 56K modems. I would shoot for around 20 or less.
As far as general advice, it just takes time to learn how to design sites. The sites all kind of look the same. No offense intended but they look quite amateurish and have some frightful annonyances. Blinking, moving things that have no purpose, large randomly placed graphics, music playing, backgrounds that obscure the text, etc. don't make for very friendly sites. Some of those things like music and the blinky scrolley things will cause some people to leave as soon as they come and never come back. I would say try to come up with sites that are easier on the eyes, with an identifable logo and give someone a reason to stay should be the overall goals. Best way to do that is: 1.) Learn HTML. Editors like the one that you are using are not too good. Learn how to hand-code even if you decide to use a WYSIWYG editor. 2.) Look around you. Find sites that you like and figure out how they did it. 3.) Practice, practice, practice makes perfect.
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03-10-2005, 10:22 PM
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#3 |
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Member (10 bit)
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: University of California, Santa Barbara
Posts: 800
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I agree with mairving, the sites are, frankly, rather painful to look at.
I'll comment on the first one and most of it will apply to the rest. -Yellow text on black background is too high contrast for me. It would seriously make my eyes hurt to read it for very long. -The marquee must go, the waving flags should not be waving, the dots should not follow the mouse, and the scrollbar should not change color. All of these are annoying and must go. -I personally think the links should have some change when the mouse goes over them. And I don't particularly like those graphical boxes they're in, they might work on some websites but they don't fit the mood of a memorial site IMHO. -Like mairving said, the html your editor made is awful. It has dozens of unncesary font tags, and I personally don't like all the static positioning with divs at pixel amounts that seem almost arbitrary. Background music is almost never a good thing on websites, and I'd say you could get away with it if it played once, but not any more than that. It's also annoying how every time you click on a link the music starts over. It's worth mentioning that firefox happily did not allow the scrollbar to change colors, there were no dots following the mouse, and there was no background music. |
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03-12-2005, 12:08 PM
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#4 |
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Member (5 bit)
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 22
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My site loads very slowly
Can anyone tell me why my site: columbia.colleenmcgarry.com loads so slowly? I don't have that many images. I know and see what its loading but wonder why it takes that long to download everything on my page. All advice/information and advice on the best WYSIWYG editor for under 50 bucks. Thanks!
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03-12-2005, 12:59 PM
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#5 |
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Member (10 bit)
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: University of California, Santa Barbara
Posts: 800
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Don't make two posts for the same question - I'm responding in your original thread.
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03-12-2005, 01:06 PM
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#6 |
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Member (10 bit)
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: University of California, Santa Barbara
Posts: 800
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In response to your second thread about the same question...
It looks like you've changed your Columbia webpage, but it still suffers from poor quality code that is much bigger than it should be (27kB for HTML alone!). A lot of the is the javascript (which I assume is for the links on top) that you could simply cut out and have a much simpler two-line rollover technique in CSS. You have 300kB of images and a 600kB music track as well, so your page is close to 1MB, which is way, way to big for what your page actually is IMHO. One quick way to get your image size down is get rid of geo5shd3p27.png which appears to be nothing but a 176kB uniformly blue graphic. This could be done much more effectively with a tiled image of background properties. Getting rid of the music track will go a long way to speeding up load time. Another problem with the page is that the links on top don't work if the mouse is directly over the text, only if it is in the box and not on top of the text. And I don't see the need for the white dots in those boxes and a fancy rollover graphic. You have improved the readability of the page with a much better color scheme. However, the links at the bottom seem to be very inexplicably colored, with white orange and blue in no apparent order. You don't want too many different colors at once, it makes things more difficult to read. As for a good WYSIWYG editor, I've used Dreamweaver, and it works pretty well, the code is only somewhat messy. But no WYSIWYG editor is an excuse for not knowing HTML and cleaning up the code afterward. There is also no reason for all the statically positioned elements on your page which I assume the editor made, it can be done much simpler, and you can keep the absolute positioning, but you shouldn't need to explicitly position every single element. Last edited by mattg2k4; 03-12-2005 at 01:16 PM. |
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03-12-2005, 03:38 PM
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#8 |
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Barefoot on the Moon!
Staff
Premium Member
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Northeastern USA
Posts: 13,385
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Moderator's Comment: I have merged the two related threads. [/Moderator's Comment]
----------------------- As for the webpages in question, sorry to say it, Lefty, but you've got way too much going on. They're way too flashy. You're going to need to cut back. It's alright to have one or two simple animations, but when you have a whole slew of them on one page, loading time skyrockets and visitors are turned off by that and all the visual effects. Yes, it looks cool. That's how I started out way back when, but I learned about what attracts/deters visitors and how to cut down on loading time. It takes a lot of practice to make a really good webpage. So, once you've gotten over the excitement of being able to create a flashy page, move on and take a more serious look at webpages. Vistors are attracted by content, not flashy animations. Graphics are ment to support the content, not the other way around.
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