My site wont display until it has been fully loaded

i think this is causing people to exit before it loads

[PFOnline]

Hi all, something is weird with my site. It wont display anything for the visitor until the blue progress bar at the bottom of browsers reaches 100%. And because my site is quite large, it takes about 30 seconds to fully load on a dial up connection.

I think this is causing people to think my site is down or something, and they end up exiting before my site loads.

I've been watching my "partial content" logs and its quite a high number of people that exit before the site fully loads.

Anyone know what might be causing this and/or how to fix this? Might "preloading images" be a good idea?

Thanks!

[korkus2000]

Is your site layout in one large table. If it is then it will wait until all objects on the page are loaded before showing the content. Solution is to make the graphics smaller on the page or do your layout in CSS or not wrap the page in a table.

[PFOnline]

Is your site layout in one large table.

ohh... yes :(

Solution is to make the graphics smaller on the page or do your layout in CSS or not wrap the page in a table.

thanks. :)

To change the subject a bit, what does "pre-loading images" do?

Basically i want to "give something the visitor to look at" so atleast they know the site is loading, and not staring at a blank page for 30 seconds until the site fully loads.

[korkus2000]

You usually preload images on a page that is before a graphic heavy page. That way when you get to the graphic heavy page the images are already loaded. It won't help if the graphics or gui is the same throughout.

>>Basically i want to "give something the visitor to look at" so atleast they know the site is loading, and not staring at a blank page for 30 seconds until the site fully loads.

You could position an image or text with css that has a kill in the onload event in javascript to remove it. Not a real great option. I really don't know. Maybe someone else has a good solution.

[edited by: korkus2000 at 1:55 am (utc) on Nov. 26, 2002]

[msr986]

Do all of your images have height and width attribues? If not, the browser will wait until the graphics load to determine the table setup.

-Marty

[PFOnline]

Thanks korkus, i'll tinker around with that a bit. :)

msr986, yes, i checked, the images all have width/height attributes :)

[jdMorgan]

Basically i want to "give something the visitor to look at" so atleast they know the site is loading, and not staring at a blank page for 30 seconds until the site fully loads.

One thing you may be able to do without too much impact to your design is to break the table-wrapped page into two tables - One "above the fold" (the part that's visible without scrolling) and another one below that. With this approach, the visible screen will load faster, and the rest will follow later.

Jim

[mivox]

If your page layout can be broken into a header, body and footer section, you can put each of those in their own separate table... that way, at least the header and/or footer will appear while the middle of the page fills in.

[PFOnline]

...break the table-wrapped page into two tables

...can be broken into a header, body and footer section

Thanks guys, appreciate the help. I'm pretty new to webdesign and HTML, so im not sure how to do this exactly, but atleast now i know i have some options and ways to fix this, and will keep these in mind for the next tutorials i read. Thanks. :)