Site Check

[chrismarques]

Hi there,

I wondered if anyone can have a look at my website and let me know if loading speed is a big problem.

http://www.stepz.net

Kind regards
Chris Marques

[chrisbrown]

A bit slow for me on an ISDN connection. I can try again tomorrow on ADSL.

There is rather a lot of CSS embedded in the HTML. I assume that you are going to move that to a separate file sometime. I can't be completely certain but I don't believe that every image has a height and width specification which will slow down the start of display.

[chrisbrown]

It is of course considerably faster on ADSL but still not as fast as it could be.

I can now see that hardly any of your images have height and width attributes. The browser needs to know these in order to layout the page. If you don't specify them then the browser has to find out for itself which it can only do after everything has been downloaded. You therefore get a lengthy pause before anything is displayed.

When you do specify the height and width of every image the browser will start displaying things as soon as it has received each one. This gives the user a better experience since they can see that something is happenning.

Actinic automatically adds these attributes in the pages that it generates but you will have do it yourself for your hand-crafted pages. Dreamweaver will also supply the height and width - I don't know about other tools.

[chrismarques]

Thanks very much for your advice

Kind regards
Chris

PS If you can think of anything else let me know