Website download time

[darcbar]

Ive just designed a website and its uploaded, when i visit the website on a slow internet connection it loads certain parts of the page quicker than others.

I was wondering if there was some way to affect which parts are loaded first or if there was any way for the whole website to load before its viewed... and if thats even a good idea ?

[tedster]

It's not a good idea to force the page rendering to wait until all the elements are ready - your users on slow connections will be more likely to wait if they can at least see something showing up on screen. For most sites, you can make that be the text/content area of the page by using css positioning to place the content text first in the source code, even if there is a lot of header that precedes it on the visual page.

There are many things you can do speed up the page's rendering, starting with the easy ones like optimizing your images and making sure they are ideally compressed.

There is a Google Page Speed tool that offers a lot of help, as well as a Yahoo tool called Y!Slow. You can learn more about them here: The Need For Speed [webmasterworld.com]

I'm happy to see you focused on this issue. Page speed has long been an under-appreciated asset by many sites. It can be your secret weapon in growing an audience.

[tutton]

Just gonna add some info on Image optimization, its really good for dial-up users but it brings down the overall quality of the website.

All you do is, say in photoshop when you're going to save your image you click "Save for web(which is down the list from 'save')" and mess with the settings, lowering the colors and dithering. Which will make the image less quality but faster to load.

Hope this helped.

[Urban]

If you optimize properly, no viewer will notice the difference in the images, but your site will load way faster.

Fireworks also has a great interface for optimizing images.