iWeb - great, but so slow!

[dirk.bernard]

hi guys.

I am also not much of a web designer & so I used iWeb to make up a site for my son (www.aeneasmodel.de). I think, iWeb is just great but it put pictures onto the page which are so big that it takes its time to see the page on the web. Actually a lot of friends said the same that the site is so slow.

So, are there any suggestions how to make that better. Do I do something wrong? Or do I have to wait for the next version of iWeb?

Grateful for any help
Dirk

 

[Thank The Cheese]

Hello there, great site! Love the photos!

Yes, the images are very very large. For example, the image ont he home page of the boy on the bike is 328k, which is a crazy size (usability experts recommend not having the entire page more than 60-100k!).

This is nothing you have done wrong, however. For some bizarre reason, iWeb is saving all photos inserted in a webpage to an image format called PNG. This format is one of the worst formats to save photos for the web for a couple of reasons:

• PNG does not compress photos well AT ALL. It's really only useful for simple graphics like diagrams, graphs, or text.
• Many browsers do not support transparency in PNG (which iWeb uses a lot). Internet Explorer, for example, Has trouble with it.
• Many older browsers do not support PNG at all!

The best image format for photos on the internet is JPEG. I downloaded the image that was 328k and used Photoshop to convert it to a medium-quality JPEG...it is now only 32k, and hasn't suffered much loss in quality (see attached image).

I had a look all over iWeb and I cannot find any way to choose what format it saves images as. I even tried converting an image to JPEG first, THEN importing it into iWeb, but it just converted it back to PNG when I published the website!!

So I'm not sure what to do, perhaps someone has some ideas, but it is definately the image format used.

This is pretty sloppy from Apple. I guess they are presuming all the users of your website will have a new browser, and a broadband connection. but as any self-respecting web designer would tell you - assuming ANYTHING about the end user's setup is a very bad idea.

hmmm

 

[fryke]

The only way to force iWeb to have small images is to use small images or no images at all. Sadly, it's really just a tool to make websites from iLife –*and only for people who don't care about slow-loading webpages. I'd take a look at sandvox - http://www.karelia.com/ - which should be a similar tool, basically, but might be better at this image-thing. (I honestly don't know, though.) It's currently in beta.

 

[eric2006]

Your server is down..

nevermind, the link format was wrong

What do you have for hosting? It seems like it's slow just loading text, it takes like 5 seconds for it to show up..

iWeb seems ahead of it's time, at least content-wise. not everyone has high-speed connections, and pages are slow even for them..