Some website advice please...

[S. Gonzales Esq.]

Hello - it's my first time in this forum, as I can usually be found next door in Photography and Video.



I've got a thread running there about my new website, and there seems to be a very wide variation in viewers' experiences of it. Nobody seems to be able to explain it so I thought I'd ask here.



On both my Macs (home: 450 Mhz Cube, work: 2x 2.3Ghz G5) the site consistently loads up and appears in less than 6 seconds, but several people (including some on fast broadband) have said it takes so long that they've given up.



In a nutshell, I'd like to know why they're experiencing this delay, and what I can do about it. It sounds like a simple question, but I suspect the answer will be anything but.



You don't have to read the original thread, but if you'd like to it's here, and the site itself is here.



Cheers

[JamieBeeston]

As the site isnt hosted in the UK, it might simply suffer from some slowdown / latency for people on different broadband connections, depending on where / with whom they are peered.



If speed is a huge issue for you, you simply cant beat hosting in the same country as your target audience.



It's loading without issue for me, but it is half midnight!



J

[babelfish]

JamieBeeston said:

If speed is a huge issue for you, you simply cant beat hosting in the same country as your target audience.

And not using Flash...

[ThePassenger]

S. Gonzales Esq. said:

On both my Macs (home: 450 Mhz Cube, work: 2x 2.3Ghz G5) the site consistently loads up and appears in less than 6 seconds, but several people (including some on fast broadband) have said it takes so long that they've given up.

Flashterbation. Your viewers are downloading the flash content which is then feeding in the pictures and such (or worse that's one HUGE flash movie) so they need to download everything pertinent. Flash is one of those annoying technologies that either works brilliantly or falls flat on it's face depending on seemingly random parameters.



Speed of your host, I'm assuming this isn't being hung off your broadband.

Speed of the user, again quicker and less utilised = better.

Flash Player version.

Browser type and settings.



I belive the general rule of thumb is you've got 10 seconds from click to page load before the end user buggers off so it taking 6 seconds is ok. Adding a 'loading' transition with a count might be a good move that way people can see it's actually doing 'something'.

[_dobbo_]

Tony, I explained it in the other thread - you are preloading 500KB of images which for some people will be slow and for others fast.



If you have to preload, just do the thumbnails not the full images, and load the full images dynamically as required.

[S. Gonzales Esq.]

Thanks dobbo, and everyone else.



As it was explained to me at the time, it's only preloading the 40 thumbnails, with the individual images then being callled as required.



The answers about overseas hosting and the unpredictable nature of Flash fit with what I'm experiencing and would account for the trouble.

[_dobbo_]

Ok, based on the image sizes I assumed they were full size rather than thumbnails. All your thumbnails are about 15Kb each - these could very easily be reduced down to about 3 or 4kb by applying some compression, which will reduce the size of the entire site down from 500KB to about 100 - much more manageable.

[S. Gonzales Esq.]

Well that's interesting - when I saved them from ImageReady none were over 7K, and now I've gone back and checked the file sizes they are all either 8, 12 or 16K. I'm guessing it's something to do with the way Macs handle files, but now I know I should be able to get them all down to 8K. That'll reduce the total by 40% or so which should certainly speed up the preload.

[makatya]

Hi.

I recently put some time aside to upgrade our company website (www.axis-nts.co.uk)and learnt alot.

I was a complete novice but enjoyed the experience especialy as we had quotes around £1,500 to do the job for us.

I have gained knowledge about search engineering including spiders, meta tags and flash etc.

I have looked at your site and found the following.



The fact that your site is hosted outside the UK should not be a problem as we all look at sites around the world and don't have loading issues unless there is a problem with the site format itself.

I do think that you should use flash or alike to do your image presentations as the format you are using is bandwidth hungry.

It was also a problem that when I looked at a photographic image there was no way to back page and the only way was to close and start again.

I am no expert in these matters but I have been informed that your home page is very important and having a home page that has "enter" (as our previous site did) is not good for search engines as it has no relavent text or picture content that relates to the type of site you are putting up.

There is a wealth of knowledge on the web that will help you. Google webmasters section helped me alot.

Hope this helps and good luck.



Mark

Edited by makatya on Wednesday 23 May 22:45

Edited by makatya on Wednesday 23 May 22:50