Can you tell us more about the blog and form tools please?
Printable View
I received your comments from the Heritage website. I don't think it's appropriate to provide information of a competitor here, so I will reply to your email and explain the features fully.
Conrado
Some very nice work by all - and something to work towards for the rest of us. - jb
@Pauland...
Just wanted you to know... i finally buckled and did the bg graphic in Photoshop. The exact same image that exported as 350+kb 24bit png from XWD, exported as >70kb from Photoshop as a 24bit png.
WOW... that's a ridiculous difference in size.
So once again, thanks for inspiring me to rethink that bg graphic.
And i must make a slight clarification from my first post. Not ALL graphics were done in XWD... obviously, the 3D icon images were not. I wasn't referring to those anyway, but thought i should clarify. I only meant the main Website/graphics and the glassy link buttons and such.
OH... and in case anyone was curious... the MP3 players i'm using are from "Coffeecup Web Jukebox". And were extremely difficult to implement into the page using XWD. I finally just inserted them into the page code manually.
Mark...
Hi Mark, could you elaborate on the problems you had?
I was curious and just downloaded the 30 day trial version of CC JukeBox 4.5
I had no problems at all. Even plays fine with the WD Previewer.
The only drawback is that you will need to upload the myjukebox_files files and myjukebox_files folder manually.
It would be handier if WD could upload everything in the root folder rather than just the index.htm and it's resources folder, this option could be made available during the publish session I would think.
Online Example
My suggestion would be to group everything graphical together (on a graphics layer) so it exports as a single jpg at about 65 kb, then use 99.5% transparent objects the over the button regions etc. on a MouseOff layer to trigger mouseover/popup layers which reveal the other graphics (which would need to be PNG to be transparent). That would be the most efficient method and you could probably slash the load time by 10 times. It seems the new skill in making the most efficient graphical websites in WD is clever and inventive grouping.
In fact, just playing around, it's possible to reduce the load time by a further factor of 7 by ensuring the entire website exports as optimally grouped JPEGs instead of PNGs. It turned out there's no need to use PNGs at all--even for the envelope and pad images--just force them to export as JPEGs (I chose 75% here which is perhaps too low for some images). (Note: The .web file only has jpg components in it instead of the original vector objects, but this doesn't make a difference to the exported result and was done to keep the web file as small as possible.)
Here's a little one-page site I put together to brand a youtube clip I made for a client in Bermuda. The video features a detailed SketchUp model I made to help potential purchasers visualize the design. (I didn't design the project -- just worked on the visualizations). Unfortunately the movie lost lots of quality on youtube vs. my original on my hard drive. The quality issues led me to shrink the size of the embedded clip to make it crisper.
http://www.designstop.com/LBV/lbv-video.htm
Regards, Ross
Really nice work Ross.