How large of a web site is possible?

[mcspade]

I am i the process of making my first web page with XWD. In the past I have used Frontpage. My question is- what is the largest web page you have made with XWD? Right now I am at 9.71 MB. And I have maybe 6 - 10 more pages to make. Am I going to run into trouble? I have heard that XWD is not the best for large web pages. I have invested about 35 hours into this web page so far, I hope I don't have trouble when I finally publish it.

Thanks,
mcspade

[pauland]

You should be OK with so few pages. The size of your .web file bears little relationship to the size of the resulting web pages.

If you really are creating html web pages with 10MB of content, you need to re-examine what you are doing - that size is rather large.

Paul

[mcspade]

Thanks for the reply! I have 124 pages in my web site so far. Sorry for any confusion - one page is not 10MB.

Am I headed in the right direction Paul?

Thanks again!
mcspade

[pauland]

I don't know anyone with a website with 124 pages.

If you have only 6-10 more pages to go I'm not sure why you asked!

The real question is: will anyone bother reading the 134 pages that follow page 1. That will decide if you're heading in the right direction!

Anyway good luck - I'll be sure to check it out when you're done.

Why didn't you publish it as you went along?

I can't think why you'd need 124+ pages though. I'd probably be thinking about alternative strategies - HTML + PDF downloads or a CMS based site.

I can't wait!

Paul

[pauland]

Now that I've seen the other posts about the PDF shenanigans, I can't help but think that starting the site off small and getting some feedback would have been a whole lot better than getting to 124 pages and having someone give you a great idea to make things better.

Anyway, we'll see.

Paul

[mcspade]

Great points Paul!

If you will look at www.mheinc.com you will see web page I am re-doing. We have hundreds of floor plans that need to be viewed on this web site, and also several photos and a photo gallery. On this existing site I used pdf's for the floor plans. I wasn't able to import these pdfs into XWD with acceptable results. So I have turned my floor plans into jpegs and imported into each page.

Maybe I should have went about it a different way. For every floor plan, I have a page. The reason I did this instead of using popups is because our clients want to be able to print the floor plans from our web site.

If anyone has any ideas I am welcome to them!

Thanks so much for your quick response Paul!
mcspade

[pauland]

My opinion is that for printing purposes PDF is better. Usually jpeg isn't best suited to thin lines with lots of white space and strong horizontal or vertical edges - it's best for photographs. I think the best solution would be thumbnails with a pdf download.

Paul

[Ross Macintosh]

Here's a nice system for viewing and distributing things like floor plans: http://www.visualarchitecture.com/cadmango/publo/ See the example galleries -- the CAD one might give you some ideas.

As for big sites I was surprised to read Paul's surprise on how big your site was. Sites that are resources can be very large -- nobody is expecting the viewer to visit every page. My own site (non Xara-WD) is a large one (likely more than one hundred pages - I'm not quite sure) and I can see it growing substantially. I think the navigation approach has made it easy to visit.

For me the only issue with a big site in Xara-WD is the size of the .web file can be unmanageable if you fill it with unnecessarily high-resolution images. Even small sites can become problem .web's if images are huge files. Some user's also have issue with the way Xara-WD publishes -- if you end up making even a small change to just one page of your published site, when you republish it will re-upload all the pages. If that's a problem for you you can use alternate ftp clients to upload selected files to your server. (But then you run the risk of messing up the site and so you'll need to spend time after uploading to confirm things are as expected. Adding that time to the quicker upload you might find it more efficient to stick with the Xara-WD publish function).

Regards, Ross

[pauland]

As for big sites I was surprised to read Paul's surprise on how big your site was. Sites that are resources can be very large -- nobody is expecting the viewer to visit every page. My own site (non Xara-WD) is a large one (likely more than one hundred pages - I'm not quite sure) and I can see it growing substantially. I think the navigation approach has made it easy to visit.

Fair enough. I Think that XWD is not really designed with large scale sites in mind right now (I do consider 100+pages getting on for large scale).

Some user's also have issue with the way Xara-WD publishes -- if you end up making even a small change to just one page of your published site, when you republish it will re-upload all the pages. If that's a problem for you you can use alternate ftp clients to upload selected files to your server. (But then you run the risk of messing up the site and so you'll need to spend time after uploading to confirm things are as expected. Adding that time to the quicker upload you might find it more efficient to stick with the Xara-WD publish function).

Republishing bits of a site after making changes is a highly risky business, bound to result in a messed up site in the end. A better alternative for sites with frequent revisions, would be to publish the site as separate sections using separate XWD documents.

I have a feeling that XWD will have an overhaul for larger sites with many pages in the next full release. An obvious extension of their existing scheme would be to use separate subdirectories for each page.

[covoxer]

An obvious extension of their existing scheme would be to use separate subdirectories for each page.

This is not very practial idea. If you have common graphics on several pages (like headers, footers, logos, navbars), they can be exported as a single image. Separating all pages will result in the same image exported hundred times.