Closer to finished...

[LT]

My site is closer to finished but I need some advice here.

I need to put in a lot of pics, but what is it I have to do again to get them to take less time to load???

Right now it loads as slow a molasses in January, so please refresh my memory.

www.rusticcreationsinwood.com


Yes I know I don't have all dimensions in there or prices - it's under construction!!

- LT

PS - Oh yeah: When I make the page, it balances very nicely, but when it gets uploaded, there is a lot of space on the right... whyzzat? thx

[Canis Lupus]

Looks good so far LT .. here are my comments:

1.) Most of the images are much too big. What you are doing is showing 300K-400K images and resizing them to be smaller to conserve space on the page. This might make the potential visitor on a 56K modem (or even on broadband) to be impatient on waiting for the images to load.

So what I suggest is making use of thumbnails - resizing the images to something smaller and save them as a separate image file. This will make the file size much smaller, and then you can link these images to bigger versions of themselves. An example of this is this link on my site (http://www.tolitz.com/mycar/index.shtml). There is a small image of the car at the bottom of the page, but when you click on that image, it shows a bigger image of the car in a separate window.

This allows your visitors to get an idea of the image and give them the option to see a bigger version of it, without having to "force-feed" the big image on them unless they ask for it. Also make sure that the thumbnail images are the same size, for uniformity.

2.) There are a variety of fonts shown in your site. Try to make it a little more uniform - using the same font for descriptions, the same font for menus and buttons, and the same font for headers and titles.

3.) The layout problem where you say there is a lot of space on the right might be because the table where you specified the whole text and pictures are not centered, hence they default to the left. You also specified pixels as the width of your cells, which will show normal on regular resolutions (640x480, 800x600), but will have a large white space on the right for bigger resolutions (1024x768 and above). You can keep this if you want to have a definite size for your layout. Or you can use percentages instead of pixels if you want the whole layout to straddle the whole browser window instead of camping on the left side.

4.) I've noticed that some of the sections are big images with text on them. Is this an intended effect to keep the font you want to use? Read my suggestion on #2. Try to make use of text instead of images if you can help it - it'll make your site load much faster. If you intended it to be like that to accomplish an effect (like the adirondack fish finder page), then ignore my comment ;)

5.) It might help to put descriptions on the pictures. Rule of thumb for webpage (or even newspaper) layout is a left-right-left-right image layout. This means: image on the left, text on the right, then under it text on the left, image on the right, then under it image on the left, text on the right, and so on... The page is like a stage play - you don't want to topple the stage by having too many actors on one part of the stage. Balance it out.

6.) Are all orders going to be done by phone or email? If your server supports it, you can probably put a shopping cart script so they can pay by credit card (if you have applied for online credit card payments).

7.) It would also be a good idea to put your contact information, copyright and other pertinent info at the bottom of all the pages. Bludgeon them with your telephone number ;)


I'm gonna wait for the site to be finished before I can present any further thoughts, but so far so good. Let me know if you need help with it. Normally I'd offer my services as a web designer, but I'm pretty backed up at work. Hope this helps ;)