iWeb Help

Hey everyone...

I am in the process of building a site with iWeb. It is not hosted with Mac, but with an independent hosting company.

The preoblem that I am having is that the web page is pulling up fairly slow. I have a T1 connection here at work, but the site still loads slow by these standards.

I thought that maybe because it is a gallery, the pics in the main page are too big. It does not look that way because the page is 14041 bytes (thats 14k for gods sake).

I am not sure what the problem is. I am leaning towards the suspicion that iWeb builds crappy code that the system takes time to digest. Is there anything I can do in order to speed up the process?

The reason why I know it is slow, is because my friend built a main page for me with DreamWeaver, but I decided not to go with it. When I test ran it for a week with a free gallery code I found on the net, it was very fast. Now I feel like I am back on very fast dial up. I hope someone can point me in the right direction. I would love to use a different program to build the site (ie. Dreamweaver, rapidweaver), but nothing seems to be available for Intel Mac (Natively, not through bootcamp).

Any thoughts? The web page passed the XML validation. I dont even know if it makes any difference at all...

Here is the snap of the propery window.

An link to see the test could help a lot. I first would check the images you are using, also i would consider how many images you are using in your gallery. Consider how many extra images you are using (as decoration or similar) and try making one before using in iWeb. Also try reducing the original images, using images 800x600px may help.
Finally (or first of all), be sure you have updated iWeb, there were similar problems when it came out, problems that the updated solved.

The images have been scaled down to 500 by xxx (what ever was needed to keep the image the correct aspect ratio)...

Since I am giving the link... I wanted to make the Photos of my web page private.... What I did was set it up in iWeb as follows:

Site (Public)
-Page 1
-Page 2
-Etc
Photo Gallery (PASSWORD PROTECTED)
-Gallery 1
-Gallery 2
-Gallery 3
-Etc

As you can see, when you go to the page... It is not protected... No password is asked, although I applied the protect settings in iWeb...

Thank you for looking

I had no problem (almost) at all...

1.Password protection will only work with a .Mac account. I'm pretty sure your hosting company offers password protection. Not much iWeb can do here.

2. One album has alot of images and you are using a white shadow bellow them. iWeb doesn't create images with shadows, it makes extra PNG files that go bellow the original image and makes the effect. The problem is it creates one PNG per image, if you have 79 images you will also have 79 shadows, making 158 images in the gallery, this is a lot of space. Maybe, your hosting was still processing all the files, and that is why it was so slow. I have cable, only one gallery, the largest one, was "slow" (less 10sec to load). While clearing the shadows would help the speed, i would divide the gallery in 2.

Hope this helps.

You mean max out the Photos per page? say 20 to 40?

I have about 1500 pics that I need to post, so I would definetely need to cut some of the galleries that span more than 40 pics per group.

So you are saying that I should just remove the shodows? Is there a progrma that is a Universal Binary that I can use to build on my intel mac?

Thank you mraya, I really apreciate you help with this. I will try to work on it this upcomming weekend. The preoblem is that I work including commute about 12 hours a day plus I am trying to study for a about 1.5 hours a day...

So the only real time I can devote to this, is on the weekends. Is there anything that I can do with the backround to spice it up a bit? What can work well with a black backround? Plain Vanilla is nice, but I was thinking of something more...

With so many pictures you will have problems with any kind of program/gallery. If you want to keep the shadows keep the number of photos per album bellow 50.

Here it is important to consider a few things...
1. The biggest album is fast enough for me, i don't know if the speed has improved for you since you uploaded it, if it is faster now this proves the problem was the server and not iWeb.
2. You have family photos in your site, and you are protecting it, so the people who will visit your albums is really interested in your photos, they probably won't mind waiting a few seconds.
3. iWeb galleries are created very fast and easily, if you have little time to work with your site it would be a disadvantage to learn a new program.

1. The speed is always fast (kinda, since I have a stable t1/t3 connection)
2. I dont think they mind the speed but it is kind of discouraging to sit and wait
3. It is very easy. Waiting for the mouse to come in. Such a pain to use the trackpad to align all the photos properly (thats a different issue - user related).

Thank you very much for your help. I will stick to iWeb and try to mess with the settings a bit. I will keep in mind the shadow feature.

Will try to update this thread when all is done...

Thanks again...