Web Design - A Quick Loading Site
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Nasir M September 26, 2006
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Do you want your site to load quickly? If it is your personal
homepage, it may be a big deal to you. If you are trying to run a
business, or offer people important information, this can be very
important. If your front page takes a great deal of time to load into a
browser, then you may want to do a little redesigning to increase the
number of visitors that decide to stay at your site.
Let's start
with the obvious bandwidth hogs: images and other media. My suggestion
here is to take out every form of multimedia embedded in you front page
except for images. Sure, a background song can be nice, but these sound
files can take up a great deal of bandwidth, especially if the sound is
a .wav file. (I made a 30 second .wav on my computer- It came out
around 140K). Videos can be even more taxing, (1 MB or more at times)
and should probably be avoided unless absolutely necessary. As a
surfer, if I have to wait more than 10 seconds for something like this
to load, I'm tempted to hit "Stop" or "Back". So if you use these, keep
the file sizes small (Probably 30-40K or less would be OK). Better yet,
save them for a later page. First, remember that not everyone
has a T1, cable modem, or ISDN connection to the internet. In fact,
there are still a large number of surfers with modems less than 56K.
So, as web designers we must see to it that our sites load as quickly
as possible without losing anything important.
Your images
will be your next big worry. These can also get quite large, so caution
is necessary when dealing with images. For starters, do not make an
image any larger than you need it to be for the effect you desire. If
you have an image that is 600 pixels x 600 pixels, your page could take
forever to load. One of the easiest ways to reduce the file size of
your image is to simply give the image smaller dimensions. Go to your
image editing program, and resize or resample your image to make it
smaller. You can also compress your images using special services on
the web which reduce the file size of images for you, and let you
choose the images that still look good once they are compressed. There
are links to an image program, an image rendering tutorial, and image
file size reduction services at the bottom of the article for you.
Another
trick you can use is to define the width and height in all of your
image tags. This way, the browser knows how much space the image will
use on the page, and will not have to adjust everything once the image
starts loading. It will save a little time, and will also keep the page
from jumping when an image loads. After you have the images as
compact as you can make them, you can save loading time on other pages
by using one or more of the images from the front page on other pages.
The image you loaded for the viewer on the front page will be in the
browser's cache, and will load instantly when it is called on your
other pages! This will allow you to load other things you may need
without needing to worry about the image again. Finally, be
sure your front page is as short as possible as well. A longer page can
take a long time to load, even if it is all text. Put extra information
on another page and use a link for people to go view it. You will save
a little extra time, and maybe reduce clutter a little bit.
Well, I
am done thinking for today, maybe I'll have a few more speed tips for
you in a future article. Until then, have fun with your speed enhanced
web sites! |