Page is loading

[Adam5000]

Hi everyone. This is a fabulous group with a lot of great people in it. The topics are interesting and it's good to find people with similar interests.

I've got a question about what I call a "Page is loading" page.

The situation is, I've just finished designing a new web site, and although I trimmed it down as much as I could, it's still about 500 K, mostly due to a 350 K .mp3 used as background audio. And with a dial up connection it still takes 30+ seconds to download

That's an intersting story. When we were first talking about it, he said he'd like a song playing in the background. He knew a local band and asked them if they would make a cd for the web site and they were happy to do it. So he gives me the CD and says this is the song I like to have playing in the background. And I put it in my cd drive and checked the size to get an idea of the download time. It was a three minute song and came in at 22 MB. Which, with a dial up connection, would take at least an hour to load. Happily, I was able to trim it down to 350 K but that was the bare minimum.

And mostly because of this the site takes 30+ seconds to load.

So what I'd like is what I call a "Page is loading" page. A page that appears on the screen while the files are loading.

A plain one would be ok, and one where I can display some text on it to give the viewers something to read while they're waiting, would be better.

Would someone point me in the right direction?

[kaled]

It's not my subject at all, but perhaps you should look at some sort of streaming audio rather than downloading the whole track.

On the matter of a download page, this would depend on how your site/page is structured. If you are prepared to rely on javascript, you might use the onload event to show a div that is otherwise hidden (the main page) and hide a div that contains a LOADING... message. However, without seeing your website, I cannot say with any certainty that this is the best method or even that it would work at all.

Kaled.

[Adam5000]

That's a very good suggestion Kalid. Streaming audio with say a thirty second buffer. I'll check into it.

And the idea with the divs is another good one. I'm using divs on the pages. I defined each image and block of text as a seperate div and used the setTimeout() and clearTimeout() functions to animate the page.

That's another reason why I need a "Page is loading" page. The images have to completely load before they're displayed and start to move. If not, then I might have a half loaded image moving across the screen.

This may be a CSS thing. I'll post on that board too and see what they have to say.

Thanks again for your help Kalid and I'll give some thought to div idea and definitely check into the streaming audio idea.