Okay . . . I have a site that I am really trying to make multi-browser and multi-speed compliant.

I am having issues with the image sizes . . . I use CS2 and my site is composed of three main background images....

I have saved these in several formats, and the smallest I can get without losing quality is actually in JPG (surprisingly). . .

Anyway, when I use weboptimizers, it is still warning that my images are too large . . . Here are the stats:

QTY SIZE# TYPE URL
1 35236 CSS IMG http://www.alillywilson.com/topcontent.jpg
1 22754 CSS IMG http://www.alillywilson.com/bottomcontent.jpg
1 6350 CSS IMG http://www.alillywilson.com/topbar.jpg


Any suggestions on how I can improve on this?

Thanks!

I think that the problem is just that you have a very graphic heavy site. I dont think that is a bad thing. I have high speed internet, and the images loaded fast for me.

The images only total 60K . . .

I guess I will just leave it alone. . . I think the estimated load for a 56K connection is 14 seconds...

Thanks for the input!

It's a beautiful site

With these images you should be able to crank them down quite a bit more. Jpeg is going to be your best bet. That is for sure. Are you using image ready? you can target sections of your images and crank the values down.

One thing to remember. You have done a pretty good job of optimizing the site for optimal download. These images only have to download once. Once in cache, they are used over and over.

Very nice. Use of css to create the look. Very impressive. If I can give just one little bit of criticism (not a major point by any means.) We have a tendancy to use divs for everything. Divs have their place, however, a div does not give your content structure. The proper use of structural elements such as <p>content</p>, <h1> content</h1>, <li>content</li>

When using css for block type format, you can apply the same attributes to the paragraph element, heading elements, etc.

Example: Instead of <div id="stuff"> you can use <p id="stuff"> and get the same effect, only now the content has structure whereas before it really doesn't. If you do use divs try to still use p tags for content inside the divs. Thus giving the text *structure.*

I only bring this up because it is obvious that you have a real good grasp on the use of css.

Something else to just bring to your attention. The site navigation. Are you looking for Search Engine placement with this site? The JS navigation is not spidderable. The se's will not be able to spider the site. They will hit the home page and not be able to go any further. And most likely because of this, they will not rank a one page site very well. My suggestion is to change navigation to text based links.. The site isn't that big, so you can get away with just changing all of the pages. If you plan on growing the site, I suggest using php or asp to use includeds for the site navigation.

I know you didn't ask for all of this, but thought I'd interject.

Excellent job Mike.

Originally Posted by ChipJohns

Something else to just bring to your attention. The site navigation. Are you looking for Search Engine placement with this site? The JS navigation is not spidderable. The se's will not be able to spider the site. They will hit the home page and not be able to go any further. And most likely because of this, they will not rank a one page site very well. My suggestion is to change navigation to text based links.. The site isn't that big, so you can get away with just changing all of the pages. If you plan on growing the site, I suggest using php or asp to use includeds for the site navigation.

Thanks for the input . . . here is a little question . . . I am not sure why I like it, but I really like the look of the navigation . . . I don;t know how to create a simlar effect in HTML/CSS/PHP etc . . . so as a solution, can I not put in a foot with some tiny text links or something in addition to the JAVA to allow for the sprider crawl?

You realy do not want to put *tiny* text on a page. This is a red flag for the se's that you are hiding something. Borders black hat- something on the page only for the purpose of search engines.

a noscript tag would probably be better. search engines should find this. and follow the links. Put this either right before or right after the link to the js file.

<noscript>
<a href="http://www.alillywilson.com/">ALW Home</a> | 
<a href="http://www.alillywilson.com/work.html">Author's Work</a> | 
<a href="http://www.alillywilson.com/fans.html">Fan Community</a> | 
<a href="http://www.alillywilson.com/journal.html">Author's Journal</a> | 
<a href="http://www.alillywilson.com/misc.html">Other Information</a> | 
<a href="http://www.alillywilson.com/contact.html">Cantact ALW</a>
</noscript>

But you could easily produce that in css.