i've been developing my site on an 8mbps connections and have just found out one of my pages takes nearly 40 seconds to load on a 56k modem.
my question is this, since i have most of my files (images) repeated page after page, can i insist they be taken from the cache? or is this a browser setting i cannot change for my viewers?

thanks folks

;p

It should do that by default. Are you taking the 40 second guess from dreamweaver estimates?

You probably need to just compress your graphics more... can we see the page?

Cheyne: I get the speed report from websiteoptimization.com
funkdaddu: sure the page http://www.thatvilla.com/rental.php?rentalID=294

i don't really want to reduce the quality of my images, tried it and it looks naff. any other suggestions as to how to improve load times?

;p

Well in looking at it there are a bunch of images that are GIFs that if there were JPEGs would decrease the size dramatically:

buttonBorder.gif
menuframe.gif

And these are pretty big, even for JPEGs:
top1.jpg 84k
top2.jpg 29k
quickSearch.jpg 23k

I can shrink down those jpegs to 1/4 of their size without much quality loss. You need to have some quality loss in order to compress the files. People will just leave you page if it takes too long to open.

Also design wise, it seems like you have a lot of wasted space at the top, esp. for people with 800x600 screens, they won't even see the content unless they scroll down... if you tweak the design and close up some of the space up top it will help both problems.

To help shrink HTML size, try putting all your JS into a single, .js file instead of on the page.

This isn't the most practical solution, possibly make the overall loadtime longer but it only needs to load once. You can do the index.php?=blahblah or use iFrames. But compressing and losing some quality is probably better. You usually don't notice the different.

hmm, interesting. what do you use to shrink the images?. i used irfanview but the quality loss was too great.

I just used Photoshop's Save for Web option and lowered the quality until it was a good balance of size vs. quality. You should be able to do the same in whatever app you use, just lower the quality in increments of 5 or 10 until it is small, but looks ok. Generally, I go as low as I can with out it looking bad.

^ I would do that, but you can also use Adobe Imageready to do the same thing - You can also see the preview and everything, so its a good way to go

PS and ImageReady's Save for web are nearly identical... except that IR's is done in the main window, and PS's is done in an separate window. I didn't know if his app had a preview pane.