Speed Issues

Anon

I´ve just finished my e-commerce site, all pages are .php3/.php

<a href="www.jamesboylan.com">www.jamesboylan.com</a>

But my client complaints about access speeds, I am testing DB based sites and I find them quite slow compared to yahoo, lycos...

What can I do to speed up my site and keeping a nice looking design?

Than you guys/gals

Pepe -Spain-

Anon

You should start with a MAJOR cleanup of your HTML, which currently is splattered with multiple BODY tags, multiple Javascript sections, redundant stylesheet and font tags, et cetera.

Some of these are just clutter, but your homepage hung Netscape Communicator for minutes at a time when I tried to use the site. The HTML isn't even remotely valid. I'm reluctant to try it again. (I had to switch to Konqueror for further browsing.)

You also should give some close attention to how you use tables -- if you carefully cut your page(s) into a couple of horizontally distinct components, you can allow the top portion to render while the bottom is still being retrieved. This increases the perceived performance of the site, which is MUCH more important than real performance.

As for performance relative to Lycos and Yahoo -- note that Yahoo's pages, including graphics, tend to come in under 20K. That's just not going to happen on a catalog site.

You might want to consider caching into the local filesystem some components that are currently being retrieved from the database, if it's reasonable and appropriate to do so. Product descriptions might qualify: How often do they change?

Anon

Thank you Steve, I only know I know nothing...

How do I do this? Can you help me please?

Thank you again

Steve Yelvington wrote:

You should start with a MAJOR cleanup of your HTML, which currently is splattered with multiple BODY tags, multiple Javascript sections, redundant stylesheet and font tags, et cetera.

As for performance relative to Lycos and Yahoo -- note that Yahoo's pages, including graphics, tend to come in under 20K. That's just not going to happen on a catalog site.

You might want to consider caching int....

Anon

As a rough example:

<body>
<table width=640>
<tr>
Various junk goes here to display the site logo and the top part of a page ...
</tr>
</table>

<table width=640>
<tr> (et cetera ... more stuff, and potentially embedded tables ... but read note below)
</tr>
</table>
</body>

Any time you can avoid embedding tables inside of tables, you'll come out ahead in terms of browser performance and behavior. Also, always be sure to specify WIDTH and HEIGHT tags for images. Both of these are important because the dimensions of any embedded objects must be available before the browser can calculate where to draw the table cells. If the values are missing from the IMG tag, the browser has to read the retrieved image before it can start the work. If there is an embedded table, it must be fully built before the parent table can be built.

These issues are especially important with Netscape. They are not as important with Internet Explorer (which handles missing data a little bit better), but the perceived speed will still be better if you follow these coding practices.

Anon

Besides totally crashing Netscape, your pictures are too large 15-20 k each. When displaying a bunch of items that adds up to alot of bandwidth. Try Photoshop or some other program (Photodraw) to get the gif's down in size.

Also, I found it hard to figure out where I could add stuff to the cart.

I would default quantity to 1 in each quantity box and place an add to cart link next to each quantity box.

Just my two cents worth...

Good luck.

Anon

Thank you again Steve, I will redesign the hole site (uffffff) Hope I am not more stupid than others and end up with a fast looking site sooner or later.

Anon

All good suggestions, but the first thing you should do is throw out whatever program you're using to generate your HTML. This is the source of the clutter that Steve referred to, and it's costing you a lot in terms of load time. Your front page is a hefty 47K, and much of that seems to be in empty or unnecessary font and div tags. (By contrast, www.yahoo.com is about 17K. Your page probably has more content, but not that much more.) Just cleaning up the HTML and optimizing GIFs, as Bruce recommended, could cut your load time in half.

Also, while this isn't a speed issue, I'd strongly recommend testing all your pages in Netscape as well as IE. Netscape's stricter than IE, so it will encourage you to write cleaner HTML. More important, you'll avoid alienating customers with a website they can't access.

Anon

Thank you Beth,

I am usign Dreamweaver 3.0 for creating tables and aligning text and images, I also use Editplus for the coding.

What do you suggest?

Reagards,

Pepe Peinado

Anon

I know it's tough when you design your first site and have all these problems, but the fact is, it's often better to throw the first version of something away than to try and fix it, and the knowledge gained from that first failed attempt will result in a much better second design.

You might want to look at www.w3.org and find the html specificiation, it is basically the bible of web page/html rules.

Anon

Thank you Scott, glad that you guys are there to help, three months ago I had no idea on webdesign and it is getting tougher than I thought, I have already started a new version, I will tell you when it is finish for you to be picky on it.

Regards,

Pepe

Anon

Dreamweaver's not a bad product, but it's causing you a lot of problems. I'd suggest Hotmetal Pro (available in shareware). It chokes on PHP, but since you're only using the HTML generator for layout and adding PHP later, that shouldn't be a problem.

The nice thing about Hotmetal is that it's got 4 modes: HTML source, layout, preview and tag. The tag mode is similar to layout mode, but it also displays tag references on the screen, making it easy to see when clutter is starting to creep in. It provides a nice transition between layout (which hides the HTML entirely) and straight HTML source editing. Hotmetal isn't as sleek and user-friendly as Dreamweaver, but that's not entirely bad. I think it's the user-friendliness that's getting you into trouble.

Please understand, Hotmetal isn't a substitute for learning HTML, but a tool to make the transition easier. If you take advantage of tag mode and actually look at the tags it's creating, and keep an HTML reference handy to look up unfamiliar tags and attributes, it will help you get to know the language. Before long you'll be editing your HTML in EditPlus, like a real pro. 😉

Anon

I recommend learning to code using a regular text editor such as notepad, vi or emacs. If you template and use PHP smartly, it isn't much more work (or can even be less.)

If you feel you really prefer some sort of HTML generator, you should go through to code and make sure you know what it's doing everywhere and see what optimizations can be made.

Anon

Thanks Harlan,

I am using Editplus for coding but I still need Dreamweaver for perspective and design purposes, is this right?

Anon

I recommend learning to code using a regular text editor such as
notepad, vi or emacs.

Gee, and what have you got against ed??? :-)

Anon

My vote is for 'pico -wb filename' which turns one lone lines and search/replace, it's also got copy and paste, and those are all the things I need in a text editor.