Hi, a while back I asked for some input about a website I had put together and I received a lot of great responses so, I thought I would ask for some new input about another site I just put up called You Go Girl, at www.tambassadorpress.com. It's a bath and body gift store with lots of goodies. :P
I have been trying to optimize my speed on my site, but I'm not quite satisfied. I have tried making all my images smaller but they are already down to the barest minimum size and I have tried html compressors. If anybody has any other advice on how to speed up my website I'm all ears.
So, thanks for the reviews in advance...
Regina :)
About the image size:
You don't need to put the text in images (on the home page). Your main text on the right is 22kb and could be just a few bytes of text and some css.
Also the pic on the home page is 69kb... are you sure you can't get that smaller? I generally aim for a max size of 20kb or so.
The main problem could be that the pages are not valid HTML, so the browsers have to do a lot of work in rendering them and that will make them appear very slow. Plus there are Javascript errors on the pages...
Also there is a lot of junk html in the source, which will slow things down. Its hard to explain here, but if you check the source of the pages, there is a lot of surplus tags and code and most of the pages could probably be 25% of the size that they are. This is one of the problems with using an HTML generator to create the pages.
BTW, there is no point in disabling right click events really, folks can just turn off javascript and collect the graphics.
Sorry if all that sounds a bit critical... the basic pages look and navigate quite well, but the above points are just technical errors that will need to be taken care of.
HTH
This is just my opinion, but I think you should design pages that resize when the user resizes the window. In other words, don't enforce your preferences on the user. Especially if you want them to buy something from you.
As for the graphics, I agree that anybody with a little knowledge will be able to disable java script, or even download them with wget (http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html) (disclaimer: I haven't tried this yet, so there maybe other protections, like referrers), but how many people have that knowledge? I think this will stop the casual user from downloading her copyrighted graphics (I read the disclaimer). I do think that the message should be a little more tactful though. Again you're a business trying to sell something. No need to offend the customers. "Right click has been disabled for obvious reasons." is enough, don't include that part about being ashamed. Again, this is my opinion.
As for the text in graphics, again, I agree. The more text on the page, the more google will do with it.
Other than that, the site looks great. Nice graphics, I can see why you don't want them downloaded and used elsewhere.
Thanks for all the helpful info.
I thought I had gotten rid of that darn javascript, but anyway I'll make sure it's gone. I had not intended for it to be on this site.
So, how do you design pages that resize when a user resizes a page? How was the speed on the pages? Were they just a tad bit too long?
I was thinking that maybe smaller pages might be the way to go, but I'm still thinking on that.
Regina
I think maybe your compression was doing more harm then good. It delayed the display for me a bit.
I use tables set to percentages in order to gain some control over content layout but still allow it to resize for the users window.
All right, I went through my whole site and checked out all the images. I reduced their file size and then I revamped my pages so that they are shorter and I changed all my images of text to plain text and and I have to say my pages are loading very fast for me. :P I also got rid of that compression thing, didn't really work all that well, anyway.
How about you guys? Are they loading faster for you?
You all have been very helpful to me and I think I am completely satisfied with the speed of my pages. I really wanted them to be quick so the potential customer doesn't leave before they get a chance to see my products and I think now, I have accomplished that.