An odd question, but - how fast is your internet connection?

Bob Holo · January 2009

I'm going through the throes of web development right now and am getting educated about the tradeoffs of size vs. load times for websites. Well, to be blunt, my better half said: Don't make your website slow - that's a drag!

She's smart - that's why I put that ring on her finger

haha.. so at any rate, I want to put cool things up for people but I don't want to make it slow.

Bottom line, help me not be a dingbat and give me some sense of what kind of internet connectivity you have so I know where to draw the line regarding size. Of course, most really big things just wind up getting put on youtube these days - but I'm talking about things like pictures of players and guitars and things in the process of getting built and such - which people tend to find interesting but which also tend to add up quickly and really slow things down so I want to be sensitive to that.

Craig Bumgarner · January 2009

Personally, I like websites the load fast over bells and whistles. Keep the home page simple, branch out through the menu interface where you can offer bigger band width treats (large pics, 360 degree java viewers, videos, etc.)

Craig Bumgarner

steven_eire · January 2009

if you do include videos, imo it's best to play them by streaming them with some kind of flash player ( like the way youtube operates ) not everybody wants to install players like realplayer etc.

also some other ways to cut load time down are to use css files to style the site rather than html tables

optimise images in photoshop ( for example for photo type images use jpg compression and for images with less colors e.g. buttons use the gif file type etc. )

i've been working as a webdesigner for a few years so if you have any particular questions about optimising your site or anything else let me know

djangology · January 2009

Bob, you can use Google Analytics to track that stuff and you'll be able to figure it out without having to ask people. Also, your web host provider, in addition, probably gives you a cPanel stats page that lets you see downloaded traffic on a per-file basis from your site.

As far as videos go, you can down-encode them with SUPER (http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html ) , to various different formats (I use Xvid+MP3 in a AVI container), to improve the efficiency of the content on your site.

Bob Holo · January 2009

Wow - thanks gents - I'm cranking through these techniques - have been doing pictures for a few hours; learning the optimization. It's driving me nuts not building but this is good - need to learn the web part too and the hands need a break sometimes.

The web optimization of photos is just freaky... 1/10 to 1/20 the size and they look about the same. I'd figured out how to drop them to ~ 1/2 size, but 1/10 and less.... that's just wild.

At any rate - thanks very much.

Fingers · January 2009

I am on Safari on a Mac and I find this website to be a very slow load comparatively. The other guitar sites I go to are quite fast...a couple are slow however.

Slow page loads are a drag, but LOL it was not that long ago I had dial up...we got cable modem some years ago and it mostly is blazing fast.