Is there anything I can do to speed up iWeb download times?

Question

I was wondering if I could ask the forum a couple of questions. (I have had a look through previous posts but wasn't able to find the answers I need. Apologies if my questions have been answered before).
I bought iWeb a few days ago and website building is virgin territory for me. Over the weekend I put together a site. This is albeit a skeleton site, but the final site will be pretty much the same, only with more picture and text content.
The site is primarily about displaying photographs to picture editors (etc) so fastish download times are important for me . On my G5 (with reasonable broadband), and after emptying the cache, the site opens very slowly. (Page opening times range from 5 seconds to 10 seconds). This is unfortunately far too slow for my needs.
I have tried to speed up the download times by a variety of means:
(1) Reducing the file size to 30kb jpeg files in ImageReady using 'save for web'
(2) Using the 'original size' facility in inspector.
Nothing seems to be increasing the download times to acceptable speeds.
Does anyone know what I can do, if anything?
Please check out this skeleton site at:
http://web.mac.com/gregoryclements/iWeb
Any help or feedback with this would be very much appreciated.
Cheers,
Greg
1.6GHz PowerPC G5   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Hi Greg,
Went to your web site. Page loading time wasn't too bad here, but I'm a photographer also and am sympathetic to your need for speed.
Here's what I found and my current ideas for speeding up page loading speed.
I grabbed two of your images and found that they were 450k png files, not 30k as mentioned plus the images, in my opinion, are soft and could be sharper.
Some iWeb observations re: Photo Pages and Image Optimization Workflow
Dropping hirez files into iWeb it will automatically "Fit Image" to 800x800px with a jpeg compression of 10.
Watching users open my web pages I've noticed and feel:
a) Alot of these folks are PC users and their display resolutions are not set as high as we use editing photos.
b). Because of this, images over 500px high cripples some users from seeing the bottom of a page and controls that may be there.
c) My current workflow includes using "Fit Image" to Width 700px and Heigth 500px.
Following are Custom and Batch Image Processing Workflows
These will work with Raw, Tif or Jpg images and will assume that you have reasonably worked up your images applying your own voodoo.
Custom Image Processing Workflow. (using smallest file, quick version)
1. Load images into Bridge
2. Edit and manually sort images into the order you want.
3. Renumber images with (sequence)(-)(Filename)
4. Use Tools->Photoshop->Image Processor
Save the files as sRGB Tiff and Fit Image H500px by 700px
5. Open images in Photoshop
6. Apply your custom image image corrections to each image
7. Sharpen the images
8. Save for Web using jpeg with medium compression.
9. Images are now ready for web use.
Using this process a couple of times you will come away with a feel for the Custom image correction and amount of sharpening and compression works best for your images.
Now you are ready to start batching images.
First create a bunch of commonly used action.
I have a "Sharpen" folder containing actions named:
30 SmartSharp
40 SmartSharp
50 SmartSharp
60 SmartSharp
etc.
Also, I have a Convert to Profile folder of actions
A Color Correct folder of actions that calls on some of my favorite nik Color Efex filters and presets.
And a "Save As" folder of actions containing
Save4Web high
Save4Web medium
--Don't let me lose you here becase here comes the good part
Create a folder of "Combined Actions" and create some useful combinations.
Example: "sRGB 50Sharp WebMedium" that calls on three of the actions previously created Convert to Profile, SmartSharpen and Save As
Now you are ready for:
Batch Image Processing Workflow
1. Load images into Bridge
2. Edit and manually sort images into the order you want.
3. Renumber images with (sequence)(-)(Filename)
4. Use Tools->Photoshop->Image Processor
Save the files as sRGB Tiff and Fit Image H500px by 700px
but this time use: Apply Action "sRGB 50Sharp WebMedium"
5. Images are now ready for web use.
Respectfully submitted,
Junebug Clark