Built for SPEED

Think your web site is really quick? Maybe you are seeing it loading from your own computer. To see it the way the rest of the world sees it, log on to the Internet, clear out your 'cache' (all the temporary files saved from web sites visited before) and then visit your own site to see it at the same speed as your visitors see it - you may be unpleasantly surprised! And if you really want to experience your site as many visitors do - try it on a dial-up link.

Everybody like quick sites. Everything a visitor downloads from your site takes time. The key to a speedy site is to download less 'stuff'.

This site uses the same basic images for every page. The first time you load a page on this site, the 'logo', table outline images, and mini-icons at the bottom of the page are downloaded from my site into your computer's 'temporary internet files' space then displayed. But when you go to another page, they all get loaded from your computer - much faster! So consistency of appearance makes this site run faster.

Every image on this site includes height and width attributes. Your browser does not need to do any calculations to figure out how to arrange the page before displaying the images ... time saved equals a faster site. Another benefit of including image size attributes is that the page never 'jumps around' as it is being displayed.

Everything on this page could have been included in the html tips page. That would have made the tips page bigger and slower loading. And if you hadn't been interested in these 'speed tips' you would have wasted your time. By setting up smaller pages with specific content and providing links, this site has been speeded up. You only loaded what you wanted to see.

And the best tip of all is understand images. There is a right time for a GIF image and a right time for a JPEG image. If you want large pictures on your site, link them from a thumbnail image .. that way visitors only wait for small (thumbnail) images to load, then if they want to see the big picture they click the thumbnail! You can find more detail on this tip if you click here.

Last - but by no means least - try and get everything on your site on your server. Why slow your site down because a site somewhere else is overloaded? And this is also good practice because it means you are not 'stealing' bandwidth from another service.

And if you're looking for some more detailed suggestions on how to speed up your web site for your visitors, then go see my 'speedy' help site at continue.to/speed