Web site size limit?

[Gorgon]

I hope to use Web Designer 11 to create a website devoted to the work of a certain artist and writer. I plan to include a catalogue of her major art works. There will be one page for each painting, containing a description, an analysis, and sometimes a small image. At most there will be 300-400 words per page, but about 500 pages. Is there an upper limit on the number of pages Xara can handle? Perhaps the size of the web site will be limited by the space available from my web host? Will the size of the site affect the speed at which it will run?
As you can tell, I know little about these things – which is what attracts me to Xara in the first place.
Many thanks in advance of any help you can give.

[gwpriester]

500 pages sounds like a lot. I'm not sure what the upward limits are for a website. You might consider breaking the site into smaller units will will all be linked together as a seamless unit. There is an old Xara Xone Workbook article on how to do this here http://www.xaraxone.com/webxealot/wo...kbook%201.html

Check back to see if some of the other member have other suggestions.

[Cloud]

My suggestion is to create a few pages and have all the pages you were going to do the actual paintings as a catalogue on something like ecwid, with that you are able to remove the shopping cart part and have instead an online catalogue, that way ecwid does all the hard work off the site. Or you could create this in wordpress. just use a simple free theme (lots for artists) and enter each painting as a post. Having this many pages on xara can be seriously slow, unless of course you have plenty of memory and a fast pc.

[Egg Bramhill]

I agree with Cloud. With 500 pages the navigation is going to be an issue and cms programs like Joomla and Wordpress are far better for this type project with excellent Search features built in.

If you really want to do it in Xara then do as Gary suggests, split the site into sub-sites with around 20 - 40 pages per sub-site perhaps using categories of the artists work.

Is there an upper limit on the number of pages Xara can handle? Perhaps the size of the web site will be limited by the space available from my web host? Will the size of the site affect the speed at which it will run?

There's no page limit as far as I'm aware, but opening up the site with 500 pages would become slow. I don't think space would be an issue with a web host. The size wouldn't effect the speed the site would be delivered.

[Acorn]

The only way you can create a xara site with 500 hundred pages with images is to create a number of Placeholders and in the body of these reference out to the required images using HTML.
The graphic files would have been loaded to a separate folder using an FTP program.
This considerably lessens the burden the xara application has when uploading site changes.

Acorn

[gwpriester]

Acorn - That sounds like a good solution. Can you give us an example of how Gorgon, who says he is new to all of this, can do this in WD11?

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Gary,


I think Acorn means to ftp all the required images to a folder "images" and reference them from Xara using placeholders thus:

<iframe src="http://www.mysite.com/image/1.jpg" width=600px height=480px frameborder=0 scrolling=no >
<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>
</iframe>

That way when you load & publish your 500 pages you're not having to load and publish 500 images.

[Acorn]

Hi Gary, I think Acorn means to ftp all the required images to a folder "images" and reference them from Xara using placeholders thus:
That way when you load & publish your 500 pages you're not having to load and publish 500 images.

Egg, mostly. All you need is add the following to the Placeholder:

<img src="http://www.mysite.com/image/1.jpg" width=600px height=480px>

; no need for the iframe.
The other crucial trick for the Placeholder is not to have the Re-generate option ticked.

Here is a one picture example: http://acorn.xara.hosting/1DayAtATime/

For 500 pages the design would only be around 15MB.

Acorn

[Egg Bramhill]

Cheers Acorn.

The other crucial trick for the Placeholder is not to have the Re-generate option ticked.

I rarely use this option, just preferring to have a purple filled rectangle same size as the content, for exactly the same reason as you mention, keep the xar file-size down.

[Gorgon]

Thank you all for your time and expertise. I can see that I have some thinking to do!