new site - how can I speed this up

[Boy]

Thanks - some people are saying its fast and others not, but I have noticed the photos popping in slowly like you said in my browser. With it being a commercial site I do want everyone to be able to load it quickly, as there will be many people out there with naff broadband connections and slow machines looking at it. I will convert some of the larger items into jpegs. Cheers!

I posted in your other thread about this issue: Link

[planetsquid]

Hi Stuart

I love your site. Another good example of Web Designer at its best. I also like the tone of the writing - it oozes trustworthyness (not a real word I think).

I notice that some of your site contains text which is incorporated into a graphic -especially on the home page. I don't think that forcing XWD to export it as text would make a huge difference in speed, but it would make the site more 'findable' on search engines. I don't want to get into the whole SEO argument again, but it appears that some really important areas of text will not be picked up by Google as they are contained within a graphic. This isn't such a problem for the casual personal pages, but as yours are of a commercial nature you may benefit from this.

Rich

P.S. Good on you for absorbing the congestion charge!

[stuart1980]

Thanks Boy, I have now grouped some of the graphics, and thanks for the compliments everyone. It was a real struggle getting this done - around two months. I worked on it for 18 hours yesterday! A lot of the problems I have had stem from the fact that I know exactly in my mind what I want graphically, but my limited ability at computers means I don't understand a lot of the technical stuff. It is only the third website I have ever made, the previous two being in Serif Webplus and from their templates. This was made completely from scratch except for the standard xara buttons.

Squid, I have indeed displayed a lot of the text on the homepage as a picture, because it looks really untidy in normal web based text. The 100% satisfaction guarantee part doesn't really need to be picked up by search engines as their are virtually no keywords relevant to my site in it. The introductory statement is similar. I have however sprinkled the rest of the site with keywords and these are displayed as text. My SEO man is now going to get to work on it, reducing the coding and making it easier to find.

He said 'because a lot of the content of the website has been embedded within the images and we need to get this to be a background image and text content overlayed with CSS'. Whatever that means.

[pauland]

He said 'because a lot of the content of the website has been embedded within the images and we need to get this to be a background image and text content overlayed with CSS'. Whatever that means.

Hmm..

[stuart1980]

Not wishing to drag the whole SEO thing up again, but this guys got a number of websites up onto first page google in highly competitive marketplaces (I've seen them and spoken to his references), so as long as he can get me there I will just leave him to it! Let's not talk about this anymore (-:

[bassman592]

It wasn't so slow that I'd click off it, but the initial image loads were noticeable. Subsequent visits were virtually instantaneous.

It seems to me that all of those images that do not contain a photograph should be GIF instead of PNG, since they seem to have very limited palettes. And the ones that do contain a photograph should be JPG. I only use PNG when I have some issues with transparency that will only work correctly (or at least reliably) with PNG. I also usually go with all-PNG when I'm testing out a site design, just because I don't want to think about optimization at that point.

[themodeller]

That's an interesting point Sledger, I am with a company called Unlimited Hosting and it is quite cheap, thought vey good Customer Service etc...

How can in tell it's the Server and not the site, Is therena way ofntesting the speed of my server.

G