C
Chris Tomlinson
Are you sure? because I downloaded the "highstreet" as a single image.
That would be very odd if so. Take a look in your cache and for the
Richmond page you will find 6 sliced JPGs. Unless your browser has
Photoshop built in
Agreed. Personally I don't like scrolling - but that's just my preference.
If you want to keep the scroll then consider modifying the site so it
isn't a fixed width. The monitor I'm using at the moment runs at 1600
pixels wide, so whilst I would still need to scroll, it would help if I
didn't have a white border down the left and right hand sides. No, don't
design for a
It's a good idea which we are already planning.
larger width, just allow your page to adjust to the browser width. (By the
way, I don't normally run my browser window full screen, and at my
preferred size I have a horizontal scroll bar just to see the rest of your
page.)
The site will work without a scrollbar at 1024 upwards, so your preferred
width must fall just a bit short of that. Oops, sorry.
Something else that might help (with loading times at least) would be to
reduce the size (height and width) of the image.
We have struggled with this, but it is the optimum height from testing where
users felt they were getting a realistic experience. It also is the
absolute minimum where the smallest ePosters (120x60) actually fit in the
shops' windows. There are many other factors too. And just reducing them
what looks like a lot only resulted in a small reduction in file size. We
are also compressing them to 40%.
Connection speed here is 512kbps, which is shared amongst the office (12
of us). Clearing my browser cache and reloading, I think it was about
12seconds to load everything, although the outline of the site came up
much sooner than that.
That is consistent with our market research. Also the general consensus is
anything under 15 seconds is acceptable to the user, anything more is a
worry. So, whilst we are glad you are within our target range on a shared
slow broadband we still want to make the page 'usable' if not fully
loaded, sooner.
The idea there is to present the first JPG slice ASAP, and the rest can
follow as the user doesn't need them until they scroll or cross the road.
The disadvantage of a table (in IE at least) is that IE won't display
anything (of the table) until it has finished reading/downloading all the
html for the table. This means that if the entire page were contained
within a table then IE won't render anything until it has read to the end
of the file. (This doesn't mean it needs to have downloaded the images,
just the HTML.) I take my original comment back, because I see now that
you do indeed have three separate tables and I had originally thought you
had just one. Leave it for now, and ignore my comment.
Thanks, but for the future, what method do other designers use for
presenting such info as our instructions table etc.? There are a lot of
sites which load pretty graphic 'tables' around the page, but they are
usually divs. Is there a program they use to automatically create these
graphical elements and align them in WYSIWYG? E.g. our partners at
www.GreasyPalm.co.uk
Appreciate your support Brian, many many thanks.