Page items display one-by-one

[Tom vR]

Hi,

I have just published 2 of our 34 pages. Only the Index and About Centurion pages are published for now. When I open the site with Internet Explorer, the page objects/items (whatever it is called) jumps up lilke mushrooms; one here, one there, and the others battle to come through. This does not look professional to me. All my pictures have been resized with the PIXresizer; they are very small.

I have used the following items:
1. normal BV shapes for the white background.
2. BV navbar for the menu on the left.
3. Lightbox for the property picture (love this tool), but even these pics pos up one by one.

Could somebody please check this out for me? I'm open for suggestions to enhance the site. I do not want to publish the rest of the pages untill my problems are resolved.

many thanks.

[LadyEye]

Re: Page items display one-by-one

Hi,

I have just published 2 of our 34 pages. Only the Index and About Centurion pages are published for now. When I open the site with Internet Explorer, the page objects/items (whatever it is called) jumps up lilke mushrooms; one here, one there, and the others battle to come through. This does not look professional to me. All my pictures have been resized with the PIXresizer; they are very small.

I have used the following items:
1. normal BV shapes for the white background.
2. BV navbar for the menu on the left.
3. Lightbox for the property picture (love this tool), but even these pics pos up one by one.

Could somebody please check this out for me? I'm open for suggestions to enhance the site. I do not want to publish the rest of the pages untill my problems are resolved.

many thanks.

Hi there ... your index page, even though you have used pix resizer to resize your images, those images as still almost 50 kbs each and with 8 pics at 50 kbs that is about 400 kbs for just images alone, have you ticked use thumbnails on that page? If so and you still have this size for your photos, I would recommend dropping them down again, a handy place to do this is www.dynamicdrive.com where they have an image optimizer that will give you about 7 or 8 choices for each photo to choose from, lowering the kbs again ...

Your page is loading at 68 seconds on an isdn modem, ideally this should sit around 17 seconds ... even at a high speed T1 connection that I use, itis 5 seconds, too much ... if you can lower all of this down, your pages will flow smoothly ...

Another tip, is to begin each page with the same framework, this framework will already be in the viewers browser and will not have to reload from page to page ....

So if you create a shell, (that contains your header, your nav bars and anything that will be the same on all pages) save it as "beginning page" open it, insert your data and photos and information for that page, save it with it's new name, publish it and then again begin the next page with that "beginning page" this will also help to make things run smoothly ...

Your site is looking nice and bright!!

[Collectors-info]

Re: Page items display one-by-one

Hi, you can still get the images to about ½ this size. This will help loading the page a quite a bit. If you take this one http://www.frequentproperties.co.za/zw114a.jpg & place it on this site http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/ you will see what I mean.
The light box is a real nice tool, but it doesn’t seem to take the KB’s out of the thumb nails. So it seems a bit daft & i cant see the point. The gallery option when selecting thumbnails drops the thumb nail kb’s down a lot.

Ah! To late. LE is on the case. lol

[Tom vR]

Re: Page items display one-by-one

Thank you both. This is good feedback. I'm already busy experimenting with dynamic drive since LadyEye's feedback. Yes I can make the pic sizes much smaller. Eishhh, its just going to take a long time and my wife is in such a hurry with her site. I have about 150 such pictures to edit and reload.

Few more questions if you don't mind....

What is the best to use for the white background: Table cells or shapes? What loads the fastest or what is the trend out there?

When building the hyperlinks on the navbar, what is the best to use for the Target field. I know what the Blank is used for, but I'm not so sure how and when to use the other 3, Self, Parent and Top. Do I have it right: Self - next page opens is same window; Parent - on the web I do not have a clue; Top - go to top of page? Please explain these to me if you don't mind.

Many thanks again. I have a late night fixing my pics.

[LadyEye]

Re: Page items display one-by-one

You are using a mauve color for your background and the the page itself you want white, I use a shape and stretch it to the '800 width and whatever length I want ... I think most do use the shape .. for this, you can apply borders to it as well, and even give it a three D look, by applying a shape on a shape ...

for a good look at the use of shapes, their colors and what you can do with them, have a look in my signature here, click the PROJECT PARTICIPATE, there are some wonderful designs in that thread using shapes ... we'd be happy when you get time to participate as well, or perhaps your wife can, lol

You have it correct - leave the target area empty to stay on your own site, set it to _blank for any links you insert that leave your site, this will open another browsers window ... that's pretty well all you will use.

[Tom vR]

Re: Page items display one-by-one

Hi again,

Oh yes, I've also looked at some other real estate agency websites; their pics are between 70 and 9o kb and yet their sites opens quite FAST, much faster that mine.....

[Tom vR]

Re: Page items display one-by-one

Thanks LadyEye,

I will use your advice. let me start right away.