How to improve performance of photo albums and navigation?

Question

I just uploaded the latest version of my new website (www.raydunakin.com) last night. I've made a lot of changes in an effort to make it load faster and work more smoothly. There is some improvement but on my Mac, with dialup, there are still some issues.
One big issue is photo albums. I don't understand why they load so slowly, when it's only loading thumbnail images. The thumbnails are too small to account for the excessive load time. Often there are several that don't load up all until sometime after I click the browser's Stop button.
Which is another issue: Why does it keep loading stuff after I've clicked Stop?
I've stripped my albums down to just 15 images per album, so the number of images shouldn't be a problem.
BTW, I gave up on using the "My Albums" template, which was impossibly slow. Instead I just have a page with a list of links to each album.
I'm wondering if having everything all in one site might be causing some of the speed problems. Would I be better off moving my photo album pages to a separate site and just link to them from the main site?
One more question: Many of my hypertext links are not displaying correctly. They are supposed to all be underlined and in a different color from the plain text. Some of them do show up this way, but some look like plain text until you move the cursor over them. (And yes, I have used the Inspector to set the format for all the links.)
Also, if anyone would like to browse my site and suggest other ways to improve or streamline it, I would appreciate it.
Thanks in advance for any help or comments you can provide.
I'm running OS X 10.4.10, Safari 2.0.4, and iWeb 2.0.3

Answer 1

Ray Dunakin wrote:
Hi Ray,
One big issue is photo albums. I don't understand why they load so slowly, when it's only loading thumbnail images. The thumbnails are too small to account for the excessive load time.
To me it's not taking all that much time... It's quite normal if you're publishing to .Mac... The .Mac server is quite slow, that's a known issue... Partially it may also be due to the template used but I don't think so... There aren't a lot of graphics on that one...
Often there are several that don't load up all until sometime after I click the browser's Stop button.
Which is another issue: Why does it keep loading stuff after I've clicked Stop?
I didn't came across any that didn't load and when I hit stop it stops.
I'm wondering if having everything all in one site might be causing some of the speed problems. Would I be better off moving my photo album pages to a separate site and just link to them from the main site?
No that's not the issue. The site size doesn't matter as when you look at a page the browser only retrieves the information about that very page and doesn't even see all the other pages as it follows the links to retrieve the parts of that very page and that's it. What matters is the page size but it isn't heavy at all in your case...
One more question: Many of my hypertext links are not displaying correctly. They are supposed to all be underlined and in a different color from the plain text. Some of them do show up this way, but some look like plain text until you move the cursor over them. (And yes, I have used the Inspector to set the format for all the links.)
You may try a "Publish all" from the File menu for that... Or empty the cache of your browser...
Also, if anyone would like to browse my site and suggest other ways to improve or streamline it, I would appreciate it.
I like it it's very clean and easy to navigate.
One other problem with the photo albums that I forgot to mention... When clicking on a thumbnail to view the larger image, while the image loads it looks like nothing is happening. There's no evidence that the image is loading or anything. So by the time the larger image appears, I've already attempted to move on. Is there anything that can be done about this?
It takes a second to load but in the end it does load... To me it's the server's slowness even if not publishing to .mac...
Regards,
Cédric