How to design a fast loading web site
No matter how creative is your design if it takes long time to load I bet not many people will love to see it. During designing website load time is really important . Below are some tips based on my experince which will sure help your website to load fast.
1. Use less images - The key to a fast loading web site is to Keep it simple and light using less of images. Images do enhance a page but don’t make 80% or sometime 100% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML and CSS. I’m sure you must have noticed some very popular sites like Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.
2. Image optimzation is must - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format.Use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images.
3. Use Tables - You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. ( Advance users can also work on table less code but again avoid layers.)
4. Less of animated gifs - Don’t use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating.
5. Design simple icons - Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor. We have used small icons in our homepage to highlight the main sections of our site.
6. Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this :
< tr background="/images/header_background.gif" width="100%">
7. Try out CSS Styles - CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.
8. Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don’t make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast. Also Completre Flash site gets ignored by search engine crawlers.
9. Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.
10. Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on Dreamweaver or NetMechanic.
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