Made my first webpage, iWeb is awesome!!

davetheblaze · Dec 21, 2006

Thanks for that, I went and downloaded a HTML editor and a reader so I could see the code of different sites and it looked pretty complicated.
I will have a go with the enhancer

mac57 · Dec 21, 2006

MartinS, I concur. iWeb is easy to use, but the pages load very slowly. I have had a web site for some time now and thought I would refresh its look, so I dug into iWeb. The pages DO look great, and it is really easy to build out most of what you want. However, when I loaded them up onto my web server (I have my web site hosted by an external hosting company), I was appalled to see how slowly they loaded. Ultimately I gave up and went back to hand coding my HTML, which is much more painful, but much faster to load the results.

mac57 · Dec 21, 2006

davetheblaze, if you are interested in hand coding your HTML, I could recommend an excellent reference. The book is called HTML Goodies, by Joe Burns. It is a Que book - a long standing fairly good series of technical books.

As a complete HTML newbie at the time, I hunted around for a good reference to teach myself HTML and settled on this book. I read it over a few days and sat down and started creating a web page. It was pretty easy - the book is well written and quite instructive.

You can see the results - check out www.campbell-tx.net. Most web browsers will let you view the source code for the pages you are viewing. If that helps, feel free to walk away with as much of it as you like. If you have any questions on what I have done, I would be happy to answer them. See the "Contact Us" page and use the contact email address there.

Good luck!

mraya · Dec 21, 2006

mac57 said:
MartinS, I concur. iWeb is easy to use, but the pages load very slowly. I have had a web site for some time now and thought I would refresh its look, so I dug into iWeb. The pages DO look great, and it is really easy to build out most of what you want. However, when I loaded them up onto my web server (I have my web site hosted by an external hosting company), I was appalled to see how slowly they loaded. Ultimately I gave up and went back to hand coding my HTML, which is much more painful, but much faster to load the results.

One of the problems iWeb has is that it uses too many images and it keeps them separated. For example, the navigation bar will be allways converted to images, but instead of using the same images for every page, it creates separated sets, so the navigator cannot use the cache to improve the speed. Text fields can also be converted to images (large PNG files) and some times this is unpredictible.
Other problem is that it is too easy to use. I have seen many people who just get too carried away and put too many images and just forget about the size.

davetheblaze · Dec 21, 2006

How do I find the size of the page and what would be a guideline for page size for a decent load speed.
Ive done one site and admit it takes a while to load, my next site will have quie a few less pics.

mraya · Dec 21, 2006

Things i have learned after using iWeb for a while...

- Keep it simple. I know is hard specially with all the effects it has but every shadow, reflection, border and fancy font means a new image created.
- Don't just drag-and-drop from the media library, reduce the size of the images and be careful with the compression with JPEGs, 75% is usually more than enough.
- Keep your photos (in Photo Album type page) bellow 30.
- Test. Sadly there isn't a standard number or formula to make it faster. Upload and test, you will be able to see what loads faster and what takes time, replace/reduce what takes too long.

davetheblaze · Dec 21, 2006

My first attempt broke all of those rules but once it finally loaded it looked pretty sweet.
Next one will be better.

Ive run some tests with a stripped out page, basically a standard template with the standard images and then without and its suprising the difference in load time.

Thanks for the tips