Webpage with photos downloads slow!

[Yannis XLS]

You 're great guys!

I see your point Paul. I thought though that by default browsers are displaying webpages in a progressive way let's say. First the light stuff, menu, text, gifs and then the images while the user scrolls down. That way even when images download slow you perceive it like it runs faster. I thought that was the best practice. Is it XARA that causes this?

I'm determined to get my hands dirty (I'm a bit familiar with HTML, CSS, and Java) so if you have any ideas how to solve this there will be more than welcome.

[steve.ledger]

Getting your hands dirty by editing Xara's html and CSS output may be more than you bargain for because any changes you make to the exported files will be lost and over-written the next time you make even minor design changes and re-exporting/publishing from Xara Designer.

Whilst widgets and some HTML code snippets can be added by way of placeholders (and remain unchanged export after export) the final code as exported has not been designed to be hand editable.

Remember, Xara Designer is not a HTML editor, it is a HTML generator.

[pauland]

Yannis, I think your assumption about the loading order of images is wrong.

At the end of the day, rendering your page requires that 2MB of images be loaded and a number of server requests be made to fetch those images.

On a fast connection, the page loading isn't a big issue, 2MB on dialup will be painful. You aren't going to "fix" that on a Xara generated page. You can help by optimising the images a bit more, but ultimately your images fly along a bit of wire or glass and take time to arrive.

I don't think you can blame Xara because you've created a 2MB web page.

Sledgers advice is quite correct.

[Yannis XLS]

No, no It's not that I blame XARA for this issue. I know how XARA works and I have already used a placeholder to input a CSS snippet to have my navbar fixed at the left of the screen.

As I told you before, I thought that browsers don't display an entire webpage -waiting to download all the associated files- by default, and that something else has triggered this procedure.

Anyway, thank you very much both of you for your attention. I appreciate it.