Multiple images with many shapes slow website page viewing.

[IanB]

Hi

I have a website page which loads rather slowly at times and I’m sure it could be faster if I were to change it but I’m not sue what avenue to explore to do so.

The main problem is that the page uses a map as a menu. On the map there are many guitar images which act as menu buttons. There are similar images on the mouseoff and mouseover layers. Unfortunately when I set up the website initially I used a guitar graphic which was itself a group containing over 50 shapes, there wll be over 100 shapes to be loaded for each guitar menu button and there are probably over 50 buttons. The guitar images are also used on various popup layers.

Converting the guitar groups to bitmap images results in a blurring of the images. I’ve thought there should be a way of naming the image and then calling up the image by name but this doesn’t seem possible.

I could redesign the guitar and make it simpler but am I missing something? Is there an easier way to make these images load quicker?

I’m using Designer Pro X (v16.2)

[gwpriester]

I think if you make the images Live Copies (Arrange > Live Copy > Create Live Copy) then the image is only defined one time. It's worth a try.

[Acorn]

As you are grouping these, they are already being exported as PNGs. The problem is Xara is making a different PNG filename for each and every one.
Select all of the guitars and using the Names dialog, name them filename="guitar".
In Web Properties > Image > Web image type, pick PNG.

Your Export will then display all as guitar.png.
Ensure Web Properties > Website Other has Retina ticked.

If you go down the Bitmap route, expand the size of the guitar group before making the Bitmap cop and rescale down.

Acorn

[IanB]

Gary's suggestion appears to work but it requires a lot of effort to change every copy as they all have different links and mouseover texts.

Acorn's suggestion seems as though it would be quicker so I'll give it a try.

[gwpriester]

Yeah, Acorn's solution works. I just tried this and if the objects are live copies then each time you change a link it changes the link for ALL the buttons.