wesite is slow

[matt_vinoir]

hi everyone.

 

i'm trying to do a showcase website for my university but i'm finding the loading very slow.

 

i guess my images and button images are too high a file size.

 

what is a good size to keep files low whilst maintaining visible graphics?

 

www.mattswanton.com

 

also i'm using dreamweaver mx. do you know how to

make a link that opens in a new window with dw?

 

finally, it says untitled doc at the top. how do i get this to say something else?

 

 

cheers guys!

 

matt

[quizzy]

I would use JPG images, with some compression. You can compress them very easy in photoshop, when saving to JPG you can adjust the compression slider and see instantly what filesize it is going to be.. Like this image below, yours is 160 KB mine is about 30 KB (Can you see the difference??)

 

[quizzy]

I also see that you scale the picture whithout resampling them, so its loading a bigger picture you will see in the browser...

[mbr]

Open Window in DW:

 

Find your Behavior Window (shift + F3) > Open Browser Window > window opens with size info, which new window you want to open, etc.

 

To center it on the page or do other things requires specific javascript (I could send you tutorial links).

 

You NEVER want to resize your images in DW. Always do it in Image Ready or Fireworks. They are made for it and will allow you total control. For each image, go to Save for Web, select the 2 window option, jpeg compression, and move the slider until you start to notice artifacts, then move it back a notch.

 

If you are using html, I'd keep each page below 100kbs, total. People won't know that there are images downloading (unless you add a js preloader), and will skip past it. Ideally, you want it much, much less than that. If they know they are going to look at a larger image, for example, then they will wait. Otherwise, people ain't patient.

[quizzy]

yep, thats what I wanted to say..

[siliconbauhaus]

to rename it from the dreaded untitled document in DW go to Modify / Page Properties and change the title. Or alternatively just edit the part in the html file in notepad that says

 

I would swap the boxes for thumbnails so at least the viewer has an idea of what they're going to see.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

where did the original source for the background image come from? if it was created digitally, you could even out the shades of gray, and the blue so they don't have any noise. this would make the image ideal for gif compression. the reason i think you should use gif rather than jpeg is due to the text on the image. whenever you compress an image using jpeg that has text, you can easily see the breakdown around the edges of the text. the text looks fuzzy. with a gif you could limit the colors to aroiund 25, which would be more than enough to allow shades of color that anti-aliase the edges of the text so it is smooth, without jaggies.

 

never use gif for renderings, photos, or other image similar to those, but gid is great for crisp, highly compressed files with text.

 

do you have Fireworks? save the image as an uncompressed tiff file so it retains all of the detail. open the file in Fireworks, then you can compare compression methods side by side. you can immediately see the difference when you change the settings. lower the settings down to the point just before the image breaks up. then save it out. do this regardless of whether you are using gif or jpeg.

 

Fireworks is nice because it is tightly integrated with Dreamweaver. if you don't have fireworks, Photoshop is either bundled with, or embeded with (depending on your version) an app called Image Ready. basically, don't design a web site without one of them.

 

...and as quizzy says, make sure your images are saved at the same resolution that yu are displaying them at. not resampling the image not only adds to the file size, but also makes the image display badly. it will not be anti-aliased.

 

your design also lends itself to using Flash if you really want a nice crisp, fast loading site. but that might also be more work. Flash is also tightly integrated with Dreamweaver.

 

ts.

[matt_vinoir]

wicked!!

 

cheers guys!!

 

thanks for all your help.

 

i must have been on this site for a year and a half now and i'm never failed!! it really is a coommunity site eh!!

 

thanks once again!!

 

matt

[vizwhiz]

hi There

 

Matt,

 

also i'm using dreamweaver mx. do you know how to

make a link that opens in a new window with dw?

 

finally, it says untitled doc at the top. how do i get this to say something else?

Item #1:

 

 

here is some sample code from the viz2000 website that opens CGArchitect VIZ forum directly

 

code:

---

  

 


CGarchitect/VIZ forum
 

Item #2:

 

This displays "Viz2000: Autodesk VIZ End-User Community Resource Portal Website'" at the Top of the Page when the page loads

 

look somewhere for this piece of code

 

code:

---

  

onLoad="MM_displayStatusMsg('Viz2000: Autodesk VIZ End-User Community Resource Portal Website');return document.MM_returnValue">

not using DW (used to but it kept eating my menus)

 

i hope This helps

 

Thanks

 

Randy