Angeline:

You are right on the money, and then some.... The "bags" page sets a
new record for the slowest loading page (without flash) that I've ever
seen. I have a fast cable connection, which often approaches a T1 line
on good days, and it still took more than a minute to load. That would
be about 16 hours for someone on a modem! (An exaggeration; I didn't do
the math. ;-)

You need to optimize your photos for the web. They don't need to be
high-quality photos; anything more than 72 dpi will be overkill, as
computer monitors are incapable of displaying a higher resolution. In
other words, you can add a 250 K photo to your site, but it won't look
any better than an optimized photo that's only 20 K. In fact, I suspect
that every small photo on your web site could be optimized to around 5
or 6 K each!

Fireworks, the companion program to Dreamweaver, is an excellent
program for optimizing photos. Hopefully you own it, so you can play
around with the optimization features, and see how they works. You can
also play around with reducing the image quality for each photo which,
again, probably won't be apparent to most surfers.

Another thing that I would recommend is getting rid of all the spaces
in your photo's file names, just to make them more readable. I'd also
break up your pages to make them smaller, with fewer photos on each
page. Download times are important; some people start leaving a site if
they have to wait more than 15 seconds.

If you don't have Fireworks, you can download a demo from Macromedia
that is (I think) fully functionally. Fireworks has a terrific batch
processing feature that is very slick. You can set up the parameters,
and then go off to enjoy the day while Fireworks does the tedious
stuff for you.

Incidentally, another great tool for optimizing photos is Photoshop
Elements, which is also available for download as a 30-day demo. I
started playing with it on Friday. What an amazing program! Powerful
and full-featured, yet with enough hand-holding that I'm going to get a
few family members to buy it for their editing needs. I honestly can't
believe that Adobe sells it for a mere $99 US; it must be the best
software deal on the planet. Anyway, Elements also has a save to the
web command that will take a lot of the guess work out of optimizing
photos if you're new to web design, and it sounds like you might be.

Photoshop Elements also has one virtue that Fireworks is missing, for
Mac OS X users, that is. Fireworks is easily the slowest OS X program
that I own, and Photoshop Elements feels much, much faster to me. It
will probably be my next software purchase, since I don't have the cash
for Photoshop 7.

Cheers,

Richard


On Sunday, February 16, 2003, at 10:07 AM, angeline chia wrote:

> hi
>
> i'm new to dreamweaver, and have just done up my e-shop at
> http://www.all-good-gifts.com. i have two questions, which i hope to
> get some advice here:
>
> 1. the pictures in my site seems to take a long time to download, esp
> my "bags" page. is there anything i can do to tackle this problem?
>
> 2. i am unsure how to write the code for processing a form. does
> anyone have a form template taht i can use? specifically if you loook
> at my "gift certificate' page, there is a form, but at the moment,
> it's not functional, ie if someone fills in his particulars and clicks
> "submit", nothing really happens. how do i do this?
>
> any advice would be helpful. thank you.
>
> angeline
>
_______________________________
Richard Levangie
A Gathering of Artists & Best Coast Dining
http://www.gathering-of-artists.ca
http://www.bestcoastdining.ca
902-431-0203


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