I am designing a large web site, a couple hundred pages. The client asked for a design that's beautiful before it's efficient. So naturally, I designed all the links as images (very small gifs), to control the fonts. I told them that this would slow download time, but look better. They said ok, that's what they want.
Now the programmer has come along and told them that it's crazy to have that many images, and she has completely destroyed the design and changed all the links to html text links. Her reasoning is that even though each page may be a reasonable download time, all those pages will weigh down the server and slow down the entire site.
My feeling is that she's being over-efficient, and exactly what the client doesn't want. But her expertise is as a programmer, so neither I nor the client have the knowledge to challenge her claims.
I wish I had more specific examples for you, but based on this, can anyone offer some advice? Is she right?
Well, she is kinda right, but there are ways to get around:
Are the graphics optimized in size? (programs like photoshop offer this feature "export for the web")
Can you separate text and image for the navigation, or is it not a standard font you want to use. If it is, you could simply use the same image for each menu element, as a background image, but write the menu elements text as actual text.
If you have many pages, try to reuse the same graphics
Where you can replace graphics by background color
and graphics with text with actual text
right - all the images are optimized in ImageReady. The fonts are specialized, I was trying to satisfy the client's request to make everything look super tight and designed. So really, the links are doing their best to be as small as possible while still looking designed.
The main thing I wonder about is what she said about all the images on all the different pages weighing down the entire site. She said that having many pages with many images actually slows the server, and how fast someone, regardless of their connection, can view the pages. Is that possible?
That's good, and helpful. Thanks.
But still, the main thing I'm wondering about is her statement that graphics on the pages can slow down the entire site/server. Is it possible for pages that aren't active to slow down the current page?
nope, what slows the server down is the traffic, which means the "exchange" of data between the client and the server, not the amount of files that are on it
The images will all load in browser buffers, anyways. The first page may be a little slow-going, but after that, the browser just needs the site info.
You could try making gif pics of that alphabet with transparent backings and string them together. That way, you'd need only 26 small pics. Either that, or imbed the font you want.
it's not the latin alphabet we're talking about here, so my guess is it wont be 26 letters.
Expect that, no, there is no need of that urqanmaster.
English or any other languages that uses latin alphabet aren't the only languages on the net, there are charsets for russian, or "russian like" languages, for asian languages, etc..you simply have to specify it.
The solution you proposed, urquanmaster, would use even more bandwidth!
oh, okay, and then it defines the font, but that only works if the font is on the user's computer. I misunderstood.
Thank you for your help, LiLcRaZyFuZzY.
driensche: Your web page loaded just fine for this 56k user. I think someone is trying to be way too efficient.
LilCrazyFuzzy's suggestion of using 1 blank button with text on top is an excellant speed enhancer. One I must try myself.
If you decide to leave the rollover effect on top as is, may I suggest a preloader?
LilCrazyFuzzy: How about having too many files in a directory? Does this slow things down? I have always heard it is a good idea to have no more than 100 files per directory. What are your thoughts on this?
how many graphics?
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