5 second site? Help!

Some, in fact many, of those may be "bot" -- robot hits that are merely verifying that the site exists....

some may be "email harvesters" - they stay long enough to find your email..... write it down and leave then they give your email to the spam list sellers.

Cheryl

Hi Karleen;

I think the problem is that the site takes quite a bit of time to load

- I am on Broadband and it still took over 3 secs to come up - which means for dial up or DSL it is over 5 secs to load. Studies show that people wait less then 2 seconds (unless they are familiar with the site) and then click out. Front Page isn't a true html code generator, which means it loads heavy, also backgrounds are nothing more then a huge graphic, so you may want to rethink the background you have on your site, that will bring the load time down.

Your site is full of great inventory - don't get discouraged, it takes time to get everything just right! Denise Glitzy Glass Studio

"Karleen/Vibrant Jewels"

Maybe alotta the folks on those shorter visits have found you while googling any ole' word or subject that you may happen to have on yer pages that had nothing to do with what it was they were searching for, so they popped back out to check the next site google listed?

Also, is your page used as your start page on whatever browser you use? One of mine is, and since I know what's there & just type in the URL of where I wanna go as soon as it comes up, I've prolly racked up tons of 5 second hits myself :-p

-- m3rma1d

There is only one picture on the main page, and it isn't clear from that picture what kind of things a visitor will find if they explore further. There is a very busy background, and a LOT of words. The frames/site index is smushed all the way over to the left in my peripheral vision. Bottom line: not a very inviting "front room". The good news is, you could improve the site a lot by revamping just the front page. Pictures really are worth 1000 words. When I go to a commercial site, I want to SEE what is being offered for sale.

Hope this helps,

Georgia

"Karleen/Vibrant Jewels" wrote in message news:J%%%e.7667$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...

Holy shniekeez thank you, I thought that was just me! I sat here messing with my monitor settings thingy for a LONG time and finally gave up, deciding "Time for more medication."

:-p

-- m3rma1d

Thanks Denise. What does "load heavy" mean? I hadn't thought about not having a background, would just having a background color help?

I was wondering if using FP themes would help, or learning how to use active server pages? Instead of frames?

More pics... I've tried that and it makes it load slower, unless I'm doing something wrong?

Where would you rather the menu be? At top?, bottom?

I also tried a slide show type of entry page, but it took even longer to load...

Yikes, is there anything I can do to prevent that?

A slide show would mean you were in charge of how long I look and what I looked at--that would make me leave in a hurry. Honestly, if you put up small pictures, *and* make sure they are small files for web use, the page shouldn't take that long to load. (But then, what do I know--I have a fast connection. I'm curious now, though, because my pages are pretty "picture heavy"--do they take a long time to load for you?)

Georgia

"Karleen/Vibrant Jewels" wrote in message news:0hm0f.7831$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net...

dont worry, your background shouldnt be heavy, since its repetitive. but to make it even easier, create one small .gif (40x40pixels will do) and put stripes or stylized flowers or triangles or something in it, so it will load really really fast. check this:

about 5 seconds and i have broadband:) i guess it is long, but seeing first picture just forced me into staying on your website:)

You're very kind!

but I guess that is what I meant about pictures being so important.

Georgia

well, it is really hard to show people art without having proper pics:)))

yes, but (OK, never mind the quality of my pictures), you can make them into thumbnails, properly compressed they'll load in no time (so, OK, when I'm at work I'm on a DS3, but shared with a lot of people), and link the thumbnails to bigger versions of the same. My web site is a (not very good) example ...

Aloha,

Maren (finally getting over this more-than-just-a-cold) Tropical seeds - Job's Tears Jewelry - Plants & Lilikoi

Oh I'm glad for the help! The thing I don't like about tables is having to update them on every page. Using frames, I only need to update my menu once, and not on dozens of pages. Maybe I need to learn java or something that can go to a special file to get the menu for every page? Is there a command that says: Go to menu.htm and display that on the left (or top) of each page?

I thought jpg displayed better, would be no problem to change the pics to gif. I'll try it and see if that helps.

What's the difference between handcoding html and using FrontPage... what is it about Front Page that makes it load heavy?

Thanks for your help!

well, front page never gives clean code, it is always very messy, and since browser has to interpret every line in code, it is much easier for him to "read" clean code.

well, maybe you should work with dreamweaver. in dw you can make template and build every page on that template. your template can contain background and links (or all other things that are common to all pages), so when you need to add something to your menu, just update the template, and all pages will automatically get a new menu:)

you clearly have a point there ...

.gifs have something proprietary to them and not everybody may be able to display them anymore. And usually .jpgs are smaller anyway.

html editors that I have seen (or pages created using them, I have never used one) insert all kinds of 'dead code' that, while it is mostly or completely invisible, is still stuff that needs to be downloaded for the page to display (case in point: I have 2 web pages (non bead related) that contain a lot of expired things in the code. It is commented out, but if I download one of those from home on my dialup line it literally takes minutes). You can go into web pages that you create with html editors and delete bunches of stuff sometimes, I haven't looked at the page source of yours, so I don't know whether that would be easy to

do. I tend to write pretty bare-bones stuff for loading speed (like my seed and plant page has no pictures on it, only links to the pictures), but that's partly due to the fact that I started writing web pages when

broadband at people's homes was pretty much unheard of, cgi was just coming up and css hadn't been invented.

Having just a background color saves you the downloading of the background image and background images tend to be pretty big.

hope it is any.

Aloha,

Maren Tropical seeds - Job's Tears Jewelry - Plants & Lilikoi

From the statcounter site:

If you only install the StatCounter code on one page of your website and your visitors never reload that one page. Then your visit length will always be less than 5 seconds! It is highly recommended to install the same code on all pages of your website you want to track. Charlie.

"Karleen/Vibrant Jewels" wrote in message news:J%%%e.7667$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...