Problem live page loading

[ClaireMH]

Our site seems to have a problem loading live pages with more than a certain number of products, it appears to load again and again and again... so on...
http://www.craigdonmountainsports.co...Books_187.html
We were advised to try the .04 patch which has helped a bit but has not solved the problem - we are worried that people will think that the page doesn't work at all and leave our site. Does any one know what is causing this problem as I have seen sites with much more products on that we have?

[wjcampbe]

The first thing I would do is move all the inline style stuff out into an external file and link to it the same way as you do the basic actinic.css. That will bring your html page size down and help to make the source more readable.

I took three attempts to load the page - first two times it just sat and cycled beefore finally returning an error.

I used a free html editor to paste a copy of your page source, and nothing leapt out at me as obviously wrong, but I gave up on trying to trace the code round about the third repeat of the inline style declaration.

Firefox threw no errors, nor did Mozzila or IE, so the html is readable and can be parsed by the three major browsers.

Email me if you want details on the free html editor. (It's not a validator, it just helps you see errors when they exist).

[jont]

May be worth ticking "Compact HTML/CGI" under Design | Options | Misc | Generation Options to help things load quicker.

The "MAP" navigation is also causing problems under FireFox (I can only get the community sub menu to appear by hovering over the 1 pixel line above the icon) - may be worth really considering changing this for a Text based navigation to assist search engine spiders or using a standard pop up menu if you need the extra sub menus.

As Bill rightly says, move the styles into a seperate CSS - at the moment you are defining them against every product and with such a long list of products on the page this is adding massively to the file overheads.

The nest step would be to consider using 2 or 3 sub sections for the books - at the moment there are 50+ books to choose from and I imagine not many will be bothered to scroll the full length to get to the bottom - 1 page fold (ie 2 screen heights) is considered optimum and at the most 2 page folds - you have 9 folds on that page.

Nice site layout - I do like the 4 column product layouts in some of the sections - it looks and works very well.

[suzanne]

Tried ticking "Compact HTML/CGI" but it hasnt helping the pages are still taking ages to load.

How do we move the styles into a seperate CSS ?

[jont]

You are best looking up a CSS tutorial on the internet. Eg http://www.w3schools.com/css/

In essence you create a seperate style sheet containing the text styles you need and call it something like text.css

Then create a link in the Act_Primary.html etc to the style sheet eg:

<link href="text.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

[ClaireMH]

We have split the pages up and that seams to work.
Cheers

[jont]

Thought that might help. You should still use the external style sheet when you get the time as this will speed things up further and should you wish to change say the font colour you can change it in the one place (the style sheet) rather than against each item.

Glad it is loading faster for you now.

[ClaireMH]

Thanks, will do.

Thanks again for all your advice.