Quote:
Originally posted by andi_germany
Simple solution. Make the website as small as possible. Sure if you create cookie cutter photoshop main pages you don't have that much option to save bytes.
1. Check every image if you can make it smaller. Jpgoptimizer really does magic on filesizes.
2. keep you background images very small or leave it out completely.
3. go easy on the java script. every word of code will make the html file bigger.
4. ALWAYS use width and height attributes on images. I cannot stress that enough. This is the most common mistake by many even established webmasters.
5. There is the 8 second rule. If the website isn't showing within 8 sec you lost the surfer. I even think its more like 5 secs. The website should show the main structure within 2 secs and then the images might take a little longer but if I see a white page for 5 secs I hit stop and surf somewhere else as simple as that.
6. Try staying away from fancy Flash graphics or using DHTML that can only be shown by the latest browser versions. Looks really fancy but you will loose a lot of surfers. I never get it that webmasters think the porn surfer comes to see a piece of flash animation. The porn surfer wants porn as quickly as possible. So a hot image on the main page might do a better job than a animation that needs 30 secs to load.
It takes skill to do designing the way I like to do it but in the end you will have a site that is fast and looks unique.
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I totally agree with you
But since I've been in this business for about 5 years, I already knew all that
But these are still good tips. I use image ready for image optimization, I set width and height for my tables which make them load faster, I use style sheets to avoid repeating font tags and such, I don't use any flash or dhtml etc....
But still, I would really like to find a website that can test my pages with different speed connexions from different places and that can tell me how long it takes to load, and what are the html errors if there are any etc...websitegarage used to do all that and was really handy..but they closed down their site and I'm looking for a similar service ...