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My iWeb website ! ! !

Slow to load

Diatribe said:
Yeah, your problem is a different one. iWeb creates insanely large .pngs. I don't think it is the code that is the problem here. I am no expert, so if I am wrong about that somebody correct me here.
They have to make the image size/format smaller but .mac servers just add to that problem.
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i think you are right. What I noticed was a lot of image layers loading all of the different backgrounds and effects, which -true this is not a code issue. Ordinarily you would do all of that layering in something like photoshop image ready, or fireworks, flatten it, slice all that up into smaller pieces and it would make it load much faster. If iweb were really smart it would have some sort of utility that would optimize images for the web... Make sure all the images were sized to crop at 72 ppi, for example... but that could be dicey, because if iweb started making too many decisions for you, the end result might not look as good. I think with all the special effect features iweb must just be adding image on top of image without doing any flattening. Just curious- are there any user defined web publishing features to optimize the file size?

At macworld the guy doing the demo made this cool looking page and then had to suffer the embarrassment of have a status bar showing the crowd exactly how slowly this was uploading to .mac. I think he was dragging and dropping all these photos and never checking to see what there resolution and size were and then had to upload these huge files. I suspect this is the problem wih iweb.
 
View Source, the slow load revealed!

Okay okay I know I just posted, but then I got the genius idea to just do a "view source" (from the view menu in the browser) and take a look at the code itself.
It appears as if iweb uses cascading style sheets and writes xml code, so far so good... but then take a look at the load script for the page. Holy cow! All of the transparencies and .Png's that upload before you even get to the pictures! These are things like that nice painterly drop shadow. That's like three different .png's layered on top of each other with various transparency settings. That nice handmade paper background is also multiple images layered on top of each other. These .png's may not be very big, but there sure are alot of them! You could easily get rid of alot of this by making the same background in photoshop and then saving it with slices in imageready as a jpeg... Assuming you have Photoshop and know how to do masking layers and layer blending.

Still iweb does it all for you and is free with your computer, whereas photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver are all expensive and less intuitive.
 
Yeah, I'd suggest that the OP at least convert the non-background images to jpegs to speed up the page loads.
 
filmamigo said:
I have read elsewhere that iWeb does not compress pictures enough, so the file sizes are LARGE, therefore slow to load.

Do you know what your file sizes are for your site?
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Just lookin at the site, the file sizes are huge!

http://www.partridgezone.com/About us_files/shapeimage_1.png

154kB, should be mor elike 40kB.



http://www.partridgezone.com/Year in Kuwait.html

41kB, could be 15 -20kB.

It's a common problem with iLife, which lets it down really.


One thing I do not like is the "Made on a Mac" logo. You have paid for the software yet Apple have to have that on. :(
 
Thanks for the input! Being a total rookie to this aspect of the internet, I had no idea that the file sizes were going to be so large. (Or that Apple wouldn't have a better procedure in place for photos we are using in our iWeb projects)

I've gotten some really positive feedback about the iWeb site I made and I appreciate the time some of you have taken to check out my site. Have a great weekend!
 
BTW kwajaln, great looking site. I sort of gave up on iWeb after reading some iWeb/RapidWeaver posts. Decided to do my site with RapidWeaver instead.

jared_kipe said:
how did you upload to your webserver as it isn't dotMac?
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So .Mac does not support domain names?
 
Chip NoVaMac said:
So .Mac does not support domain names?
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To my knowledge, .Mac does not support other domain names. I tried a redirect and it "redirected" but of course the URL changed in the process. I have done a fair amount of homework and it seems that if you want your own domain name to appear, you need to use web hosting and something like domain forwarding/masking, etc.
CHIP ~ Thanks for the kind words. That means a lot, especially since you were one of the people here who supported me while I was in Kuwait and hadn't even switched to Apple at the time. :) :D
 
Here's mine:

www.magpoc.com

Okay, it's not iWeb but I must say I'm a bit jealous. I plan on getting back into the Mac world whenever the "ibook" is updated so I'm in the "PC" world for the time being. I'm jealous because of all the slick software that came out recently for web authoring, photo editing, and word processing. I gave Pages a try when it first came out on my old ibook and was left wanting. The newest version seems very promising. I started this version of my site about a year and a half ago and can't wait to freshen it up a bit. I will, however, wait until I switch platforms again. Many of the iWeb sites posted do seem to take a while to load. Mine is no quicker because of the mess it has evolved into, but I am surprised to see how long some of these sites take to load. They all look great so far! Post some more:)
 
kwajaln said:
To my knowledge, .Mac does not support other domain names. I tried a redirect and it "redirected" but of course the URL changed in the process. I have done a fair amount of homework and it seems that if you want your own domain name to appear, you need to use web hosting and something like domain forwarding/masking, etc.
Click to expand...

Sort of thought so....

CHIP ~ Thanks for the kind words. That means a lot, especially since you were one of the people here who supported me while I was in Kuwait and hadn't even switched to Apple at the time. :) :D
Click to expand...

Blush. Thanks. Glad to have you back home, safe and sound.
 
Milking the cow ?

MattyP said:
It appears as if iweb uses cascading style sheets and writes xml code, so far so good... but then take a look at the load script for the page. Holy cow! All of the transparencies and .Png's that upload before you even get to the pictures! These are things like that nice painterly drop shadow. That's like three different .png's layered on top of each other with various transparency settings. That nice handmade paper background is also multiple images layered on top of each other. These .png's may not be very big, but there sure are alot of them! You could easily get rid of alot of this by making the same background in photoshop and then saving it with slices in imageready as a jpeg... Assuming you have Photoshop and know how to do masking layers and layer blending.
Click to expand...

The "Inspector" in iWeb tells you how much remaining "iDisk storage" is left, and you can see how quickly it decreases with new pages that you publish - a couple of megas for a couple of pages, far more than what should be with the resolution proposed for the pictures.

The funny thing is that this remaining "iDisk storage" is indicated in the same part where the "Buy more..." button can be found.

Therefore, my theory is: Apple is consciously letting the pages by iWeb be a little heavier than needed, so that every .mac user has to buy new space sooner (esp. with the video and photocast possibilities). A little here, a little there.

This is the future of .mac: for a full use, buy a yearly .mac subscription and the correct yearly version of iLife and an extra amount of space.

I like iLife'06, very intuitive, easy and fast to use :)
I like .mac, although it is too expensive for the raw features, were it not for the connectivity with the computer.:(
I don't like the idea of paying even more than before to use the promised, full features of .mac. :mad:

NB: iPhoto'06 doesn't let you do the old (light) photo pages.
 
howesey said:
One thing I do not like is the "Made on a Mac" logo. You have paid for the software yet Apple have to have that on. :(
Click to expand...

That's very easily removed if you don't want it there.
 
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