need help with reducing load time, please

Tips to reduce loadtime (in general, may not specifically apply to problems with your page):

+ use small thumbnails, not full size images and link the thumbnails to the 'more details' page

+ keep the page to about 3-4 screenfuls at 800X600 (or two pages printed) except for pages where people will want to have ALL the information at hand, like a FAQ page

+ for long pages, use internal targets from a menu to a section and back to the menu

+ keep your navigation trim by breaking down the page into main sections (if you have more than 5 it usually means you have too many sections, except for sub-sections where you may have many, many pages)

+ repeat graphical elements as much as possible, and call to them properly even if they are in a different directory path using ../ to move up a level in the directory

+ complex nested tables add to preceived load time because they don't fully load until fully read -- break them up, stack some and nest some or rethink the layout so you can make it less table dependent, or the table set up less complex

+ keep image sizes low, under 5K for a thumbnail under 30K for a full size image, lower if possible, and keep the amount of unique images, where possible to a minimum on any given page

+ the estimated page size, images and code, should be about 47K I think -- keep this in mind!

+ use height and width attributes for ALL images so the browser can leave the space and get on with the page loading

+ don't use images for text (except for linking images, nav images -- and then use sparingly)

+ use alt attribute for all images (alt="" for images without any alternative meaning) to let people read before images load -- they think the page loads faster this way

+ validate your code!! www.htmlvalidator.com/lite is a free validator and there are online validators as well -- errors significantly affect load time

I am sure there are other tips, this is just off the top of my head.

hth,

Suzanne

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Zero Cattle
Suzanne
Tables DeMystified

[This message has been edited by Suzanne (edited 02 April 2000).]

[url="http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html"]http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html[/url][/url]

this may be what you are looking for

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Thanks, guys!

I really didn't want to, but I took the HumanClick off my sitenav, and it made my pages load twice as fast.

I hate that too, because I really think the idea is perfect for a retail site. I suppose I can put it on another page, and just link to it from the sitenav.

I will work on the crunch though. I checked yesterday, and most all my images on http://2kcut.com/home.shtml are 4kb and 1kb. A couple are large, but not by much.

Can someone please tell me if there's a way to make a bullet something other than a dot using <li> tags?

~Carole