02-12-2010, 10:27 AM

I've designed a website for my band The Geckos on iWeb.

I'm very happy with the overall look but its so slow!

Obviously iWeb is designed for inexperienced luddites like me but does anyone have a recommendation for a fairly easy to use software suite that will produce a quicker running website? I know that I could spend a few months and several hundreds of pounds learning Dreamweaver but can anyone recommend something in between?

02-12-2010, 10:37 AM

Not sure what you mean by slow and I couldn't help anyway - know next to nothing about setting up websites.

The only page that took longer than 1 - 1.5 seconds to load here is the Music page. That one averages between 2.5-4 seconds to fully load.

02-12-2010, 11:17 AM

Hi!

First, I want to mention - I'm far from an expert web designer, so I can't give you tips on how to create a beautiful website; my knowledge is more back end and making suggestions on what might be causing problems.

Your website is very pretty - and has a lot of graphics This is both a positive and a negative.

Looking at the download activity, there are quite a few of the files that exceed 100K per file, and some that exceed 200K. That gets to be quite a bit when there are a lot on a given page, and on top of that most web browsers will automatically attempt to load multiple portions of a page at once - this usually makes loading a web page faster overall, but sometimes can feel slower with large files.

For example - overall, to load the page for 'C-Guitar' ( the geckos ) a user needs to download 1443.2 K to view the entire page (that's 1.44MBytes) - that may not seem like a lot, but if you're on a slower link, let's say a 1.5MBit/s link (comes out to about 180KB/s after you account for various housekeeping things), it'll take 8 seconds to fully load the page. That isn't really that bad, but that number will go up very fast for slower links or if there is any lag on the net.

two of the worst offenders of size are part of what makes the site look good unfortunately. (ie: http://web.me.com/pjash80/The_Geckos...apeimage_2.png and http://web.me.com/pjash80/The_Geckos...pamtile_v6.jpg ) Add to this that me.com can be sluggish on it's own can add to problems. Now let's consider another issue - you're located in the UK (based upon your domain) which is linked to your mobileme web site. AFAIK, the me.com servers are here in the US - which means when you're surfing to the pages, you're having to pull that 1.44Megs across the pond which adds more latency (the docs are actually pulling from web.me.com/pjash80, which is here in the US) - so the site will be a lot faster for us here in the US.

Ways to speed up:

reduce image sizes overall
reduce overall page KB
as your band is in the UK for UK audiences (I assume), move your site to a UK server (you can always find out if Apple has a UK based me.com server you could get hosting on otherwise you might loose some functionality of the iWeb site - you'll have to check what features require the use of mobileme to work right).

If you move off the iWeb site, there are many other really powerful packages that aren't terribly expensive. Sandvox (template based, easy to use, but if you want a custom template outside of what you can get with the program or purchase separately, you'll need to find someone who is good with template design), Rapidweaver (more plugins than Sandvox, a bit more difficult to use, fewer templates come with it, but there seems to be a bigger third party template market), Flux 2 (more complex to use, but more flexible))

02-12-2010, 12:21 PM

Thats really helpful, thanks.

This is my first website so I'm very much learning as I go