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Design > Speed > Up To Speed |  |
UP TO SPEEDThe speedy basics. The items that all designers should pay attention to. These tips don't "cost" anything except the web designer's time and attention to detail and pay dividends as every site page loads more quickly.
HEIGHT AND WIDTH ATTRIBUTESSpecify the height and width attributes of every image. Specify the height and width attributes of every table. These two precepts allow the visitor's browser to reserve the exact amount of space needed for each page, and to begin loading the images more quickly. The "boxes" for the images (with ALT tag messages) will appear immediately when the page is accessed. REUSE IMAGESOnce an image is downloaded, it may be reused over and over without being reloaded. Our logos and colored menu buttons are reused on every website page, but only require loading once.
JAVASCRIPT VS. ANIMATED GIFEffects like our slowly blinking arrows can be accomplished in several ways. It turned out that by using an animated GIF with a limited palette of colors, our blinkers used only 533-575 bytes each. The javascript timeline/behavior method used over 3,000 bytes. We chose the GIF's, a savings of nearly 2,500 bytes on each site page.
IMAGES IN TABLE CELLS4.xx-plus browsers, both Netscape and Internet Explorer allow the use of background images in table cells. If coding only for these browsers, you might consider using a background image, and placing text over it with HTML. This method allows faster loading than placing text on your GIF or JPG images. This effect, however, is not visible to many earlier browser versions. |