Improving speed of screen display

[bigH]

Is there anyone who can point me in the direction of any credible piece on improving the apparent screen display of html pages (or can answer me here)

Type of frustration I am having. A "typical" html page on my site would be about 25k html source, have 1 or 2 jpg files of about 15-20k, 5 or 6 jpegs of 1-3k, a dozen or so 1k javascript files (to hide external links from search engines) and an external javascript script (for menuing) of about 25k.

The code seems to download smoothly enough to the browser but takes an age to actually display anything on screen. When it does, it displays 100% of the page everything perfect. I have noticed other sites start displaying objects on screen much sooner, gradually assembling the page on screen, this if nothing else gives an illusion of faster loading.

I have tried taking out all the component parts of my pages to see if there is any one thing causing the delay - but no there isn't.
Any ideas on improving the apparent speed of display ?

[jdavia]

Originally posted by bigH
Is there anyone who can point me in the direction ------
have 1 or 2 jpg files of about 15-20k, 5 or 6 jpegs of 1-3k, a dozen or so 1k javascript files --- and an external javascript script (for menuing) of about 25k.
-------takes an age to actually display --------- I have noticed other sites start displaying objects on screen much sooner, gradually assembling the page on screen, this if nothing else gives an illusion of faster loading.
--------
Any ideas on improving the apparent speed of display ?
Don't know if you are using pre-load of images,(that would help). There is code you can find with a search for that.
A quick fix can be to add some of the images at the bottom of a preceeding page in this fashion. <img src="tan.jpg" width="0" height="0">
Also make sure that your images are not actually larger than the size you code them to be on the page.

[Nedals]

My guess.. You are using tables to layout your screen. The table contents will not be displayed until the </table> tag is reached. If you are nesting tables, this applies to the outer most table.

[bigH]

Originally posted by nedals
My guess.. You are using tables to layout your screen. The table contents will not be displayed until the </table> tag is reached. If you are nesting tables, this applies to the outer most table.

Thanks - I think you've given me a valid direction to progress

[AdamGundry]

There's an interesting article on Webreference about optimisation you could look at:

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/html/optimize/index.html

Adam