Preloader for Supersites?

[hoja]

Supersites imo have a disadvantage which should get addressed...
The Browser generally need to download all page content before it displays properly.
If this is technically unavoidable there should at least be some neutral indicator that the Site is still loading.

Currently one gets presented a partially loaded website with missing graphics or disfunctional navigation.
As soon as everything has downloaded the site displays fine obviously – but visitors usually don't wait when
things look broken. I think some sort of Preloader which occludes partially loaded content is really missing.

For now – would anyone know a slim way to include such a thing to a supersite?

[gwpriester]

Totally agree. No matter how terrific and entertaining and informative your super site is, if it takes more than a second or two to load, most of your visitors will have moved on to a site that loads quicker. For this reason, I do not design super sites.

Hoja — I am going to move this to Dear Xara since this is more of a bug/feature request.

[hoja]

Hoja — I am going to move this to Dear Xara since this is more of a bug/feature request.

Yeah, I had considered posting in Dear Xara too...
As I'm interested in getting this sorted out before an official fix is out (if it appears at all) I thought the general forum was in order.

[gwpriester]

This was a big issue last year when I wrote my First Look review. I designed a super site to demonstrate the new features and it took way too long to load. I think if this were going to be fixed it would have been fixed by now.

[hoja]

This was a big issue last year when I wrote my First Look review. I designed a super site to demonstrate the new features and it took way too long to load. I think if this were going to be fixed it would have been fixed by now.

Tweaking supersites so that one would not have completely download them before having at least the first pages appear properly might be a challenge.
Adding a little spinning gif on white background which indicates that the Browser is busy downloading (instead of displaying a messy partially downloaded site) should be really trivial to add.

[dutchim]

You could make a spinning gif and place it towards the top of the screen with perhaps 'loading'... and after a few seconds have the main banner/logo whatever come in with one of the many animations provided.

Just an idea.

See attachment. Even though it is not a supersite... It does have what I am suggesting.

Please not it is only the mobile variant at the moment... So please when previewing it in a browser make the window smaller.

[pauland]

The question is: will a user wait for a spinner and loading message, any more than a slow-to-load site?

In these circumstances, the better tactic is to show something that is of interest/informative about the site while the main part of the site loads (possibly tricky to do with a Xara site).

Some large-single page sites will load content initially only for enough of the page to fill the browser window and will load additional content on demand in response to scrolling (and/or pre-fetch content) using javascript.

[hoja]

Hi dutchim,
thank you for the elaborate sample. My question was less how such a thing might look (I'd be fine with one of the appearances
which have become standard). What I would like Xara to do is keep track of the download state and show a loader according to
bandwidth. You suggest to build an animation which takes a static time to play (as Website Intros did back in the day).

I would rather want that someone with rocket fast internet connection can see my content immediately and those who have
weaker connections see the loader for as long as downloading effectively takes.

[hoja]

@pauland,
I guess that really depends of the initial interest. In the concrete case I'm talking about websites Joe Websurfer isn't likely stumbling upon by chance.
People who have clicked that link in an article published on another website likely want to have a closer look. In this situation and with the expecation
to see graphic intense content a few seconds wait in front of a clean looking door probably was in order. What doesn't work is looking at some partially
loaded mess.

[Egg Bramhill]

See this thread, it may help:

LINK

It would be best to use named images if going down this root, as Xara tends to renumber images in a fairly haphazard manner which would require changing the scr image names each time. Also there would be issues if you use variants.