Sunday, October 26, 2008

Shiny new website

Yes, that's right. After a long-overdue overhaul, the new website has gone live. I used iWeb, which is pretty easy to use. In fact, it might even be too easy, since it allows you to do all sorts of visually gorgeous stuff that actually makes your site really slow to load. So I've had to trim it like crazy, but in reality, the only solution might be to start again, with less pretty.

I might wait and see if there are complaints.

The website can be found HERE.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The website looks great, though due to the nature of WYSIWYG editors such as iWeb, inefficiently put together - which is probably why it took such length to load originally (have you been able to trim it down at all? It still likes to chug slowly into action).

WYSIWYG editors are not intelligent enough to optimise their own code as they need to accommodate all the possible layouts, content, and so on.

- Rhys Andrews

james roy said...

You're right, and I haven't had a chance to get back to it yet. The problem is that as soon as you take an image, no matter how small, and rotate it slightly, iWeb makes a brand new image which is stupidly large. Years ago I coded my first website from the ground up in HTML, but I don't have the time to do that anymore, but I do need to trim it a bit.
Fortunately most people looking at my site are doing so from schools and libraries, where their download speed is higher than the average DSL home broadband, but even so, I will get back to it. Maybe when the thirteen projects I've got on the go are finished...
Thanks for looking at it, Rhys.

Anonymous said...

Hey James
It seems the main problem is the unnecessary number of images. On your main page, for example, your book covers which are in the background, behind the content, are separate images so most of them are being loaded at no advantage.

The images are JPG's, which are compressed and so their sizes shouldn't be an issue. Well, the largest image on any page is the background, @ 100kb. Which isn't *too* bad.

I'm more than happy to trim it for you and reproduce it in HTML. It will look exactly the same, just optimised. Let me know if you want me to do that for you.

james roy said...

Thanks, Rhys, that would be awesome.