Just done first website but seems to be slow

[Juddy58]

Hello, I have just compeleted my first website for a friend, and temporarly hosted it under the free space my ISP provides me with, just to see what it looks like from other computers and how slow it is. The problem is that images seem to take a long time to appear, it could just be me thinking they take too long. Im just wondering if there is any tricks i can use to speed this up or give the illusion of it loading faster. For example, I was thinking of using the method where the image appears as blury and then clears up as it loads, im not sure what this is called though.
Infact any advice as to tricks i could use to improve it in any way would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Can be viewed at

http://clients.net2000.com.au/~juddy/Index.html

Please dont laugh

 

[jnicho02]

Hi Juddy58,
The site doesn't look too bad. An excellent place for advice is the Tek-Tips Web Site Designers forum.

Jeremy Nicholson, Director of

http://www.firstlightassociates.co.uk

a UK-based Java and Data Warehousing consultancy

 

[DaRNCaT]

you can save the pics as interlaced- which gives you the blury to clear deal, and possibly could save the jpeg as a smaller file.
I'd say the webhost is probably slower than a paid host too.

Sometimes, when my code just won't behave, I take it outside and make it listen to britney spears music, and when it comes back it's really well behaved. I wonder if it's suffering from post tramatic stress syndrome now..

 

[Juddy58]

thanks for the reply fellas, interlaced was the word i was looking for. i think i will post this up in the website designers forum instead.
Cheers!

 

[toysyn]

Your web site looks fine.

You might want to also consider preloading your images.

You could use the preload images extension that comes woth DWMX.

Good Luck.

 

[Juddy58]

thanks for the advice toysyn, i will have a look at the dreamweaver help file for information about the preload extension.
Just one more thing, i have had read about Cascading style sheets and my impression is that they are kind of like a template that stores your fontsizes etc for different components of your webpages (body, heading text etc.) thus meaning your other pages can be created quicker with the same format. Is this a correct definition or am i way off or missing something with this definition.
once again thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[shawnan]

You really should consider making those navigation buttons into gif images instead of jpg, and you should be able to reduce the file size down from about the 12k they are to 1k. That will make some difference in the speed of the site loading.

 

[Juddy58]

shawnan,
i loaded it on a friends computer and the buttons where annoying the hell out of me, because they were slow to load up, i will now be changing them to gif for sure! I didn't realise there is such a difference in the file size between jpg and gif.
Thanks!

 

[shawnan]

It can depend on the image, but for navigation buttons gif should be the general rule. They are usually not very detailed, and have few colors. For very detailed images such as photos, with lots of color changes, jpg would be needed.

Without knowing what graphics program you might be using, it is not possible to guess at some things, but most decent graphics programs have optimization features built in.

 

[jnicho02]

....apologies, I take back what I said about going to the Web Designers Forum, the Dreamweaver MX members are alive and well!

Jeremy Nicholson, Director of

http://www.firstlightassociates.co.uk

a UK-based Java and Data Warehousing consultancy

 

[Juddy58]

you guys have been a great help, its just the little tricks (use gif for buttons, interlaced images etc) that are really helping me. If there are any others dont hesitate to let me know.
Cheers!