Preloader/progress bar issue

[ryanhellyer]

I'm waiting for it to load. It's taking quite a long time though.

[ryanhellyer]

Critique:
* There is strange piece of text in the top middle of the page which says "php counter".
* There is a horizontal scrollbar with the browser at 1280px wide in Firefox2.0.
* You only have one image for your background. This means that I see a double up of it as I scroll to the right.


I would definitely prefer not to wait till the page loaded till I could read it. Unfortunately, if I found your site on Google I would have clicked back long before the page loaded.

I think your main difficult is that you are probably using the Dreamweaver Design view to generate the code for the site. Dreamweaver churns out some truly awful code and I think you will struggle to have the site behave the way you want it without moving to using purely the code view or using a simple text editor.

[simonejones]

Hi Ryan,
Oh thats rather depressing news!
It's true that without Dreamweavers design view I wouldn't know where to start but I'm sure there's a happy medium somewhere.

The counter is a hidden hit counter which didn't show its text initially so I need to check why that's now happening..

I think the load time can be reduced by taking some of the preload images out but the site is full of images so I knew a preloader was essential because the home page has mouseovers that dont show until the load is complete.

The mask could be made to be slightly see through so that its not such a closed door while waiting maybe...

But youve spent enough time on this...I think I should battle on alone now!
Your advice has been invaluable

[BigAlReturns]

Just checked out your new page - it's definitely much better like this than with the preloader you had before. I have to agree with Ryan though that your best option is to spend a bit of time learning how to use CSS to replace your images - if you do this then you'll decrease the page size so you don't need a preloader! A good starting point I think is w3schools CSS tutorial, but if that doesnt suit you then google "css tutorial" and there'll be something out there that's right for you. And of course you're always welcome to come back here and ask any questions you have!

[simonejones]

Hello again,
I'm sure theres a simple answer to this and its something to do with applying a once only rule or such like..

Having applied the ajax loader to the home page of course I would like it to run only on initial load however at the moment it starts again every time the home page is chosen how do I change this?

many thanks..

http://silkthreads.co.uk

[ryanhellyer]

The only way I know of to prevent that is to remove the preloader. As far as I can tell, t is reloading the images on every page load, so it needs to sit there each time with your preloading message accordingly.

[BigAlReturns]

It could be done with some form of server side scripting and sessions, setting a session variable to true once preloading is done, but this is really a lot of faf for what shouldn't be an issue.
The real solution to your problem is to optimise your images, and reduce the number you use. For example, several of the images on your page are actually scaled down - i.e. a 200x100 image is loaded, but only displayed at 150x75. Making the images the same size they are displayed at will cut loading time a lot. For example,
200x100 image = 20,000 pixels
150x75 image = 10,750 pixels
So reducing an image like that could have that images loading time.
Also reducing image quality might be an option - I know you want them to look good, but some of them seem really overly large.
I'll have some more suggestions later, my internet is going majorly slowly at the moment so even small pages are taking ages to load!

[simonejones]

Thanks for the tip about the images I'll resize them and see if it makes a difference...