A Question About Page Weight and Flash

[Charles Bastari]

Due to the size of my database and the weight of my home page it has always taken longer than I would like for the home page to load. I have to be careful not to do anything that would increase load time. Thanks to knowledge gained from the forum I've recently made some modifications to give it a more professional look without making it any heavier. One modification was the addition of a strip of thumbnail product images at the top of the page. I would like to create more of these thumbnail strips and add a flash program that would cause one strip to fade out, another to fade in and so forth.

The question is would the program and/or the extra images add more weight. Since the image strips would only be showing one at a time it doesn't seem to me that they would be a problem unless everything has to load up front for it to work.

I would like to get some ideas about this before I go through the efforts of creating the additional strips, choosing a program, learning to use it, etc.

c
supplyspecialties.biz

[dave_finlayson]

Charles,

Have you considered stripping out the section tree script and hard coding all your links. At the moment Act_Section_Tree.js is weighing in at 1.58mb which is huge! You could remove this weight almost entirely by taking this out!

Regards

David

[Charles Bastari]

I've considered it. I've wanted to try it. There are posts in here about it. I don't have the knowledge to do it. I also understand that more "maintenance" is required and I'm not so sure what is meant by that in this context. I have over 7,500 item numbers when duplicates are considered and the maintenance to keep the database fed and updated is overwhelming as it is.

Do you know how to do it?

c

[dave_finlayson]

Charles,

I have never actually used the section tree script but it seeems to me that the upside of having pages that load probaly 10 times faster and your savings on bandwidth alone would be well worth the effort.

Keeping navigation up to date should not be a big problem dependant on how you use Actinic but one of the gurus here should be able to advise on the potential implications of a changeover. We maintain 2000 products in around 50 different sections and as a general rule - unless we add a new top level section - the navigation looks after itself. It is certainly worth seriously considering.

David

[Charles Bastari]

Then perhaps someone will see this and steer me in the right direction. I'm as clueless about removing the section tree as I was when I started looking for a shopping cart program I could deal with nine months ago. My salesperson for the U.S. distributor didn't tell me about the more products you have, the slower it gets part.

c

[RuralWeb]

The question is would the program and/or the extra images add more weight. Since the image strips would only be showing one at a time it doesn't seem to me that they would be a problem unless everything has to load up front for it to work.

The simple answer is yes it would add more weight and it does have to load before it will work - thats why the general advice is not to use flash where time is a problem

[Charles Bastari]

Thanks Malcolm. I was afraid of that. Under the circumstances, that's the end of that idea.

c

[Charles Bastari]

@ Malcolm and David

I am seldom exuberant , but I have cause to be now. David, your suggestion for me to consider getting rid of the section tree and Malcolm, your contacting me to reinforce that suggestion and encouraging me to actually try do it is a resounding success. It took some trial and error, but it is completely gone now from both the Act_Brochure Primary and Act_Primary. Malcolm, I also finally found and removed the remaining code that was causing the 'page loaded, but with errors' message in IE. Since I've created my own navigation links in the home page fragments, I can continue to add products as I always have in the program and just add a new link on the home page if I add a new product category.

My home page size has been reduced from some 160KB down to around 90KB. The home page load time is about two seconds, down from eight to ten seconds with my connection.

This issue has plagued me for months. The more the database would grow , the longer it would take the home page to load. I had actually been considering different software and starting over. Now, I may even reconsider adding the flash program that caused me to start this thread in the first place.

Thank you both so much!

Charles

[dave_finlayson]

Charles,

Great news, just tried the homepage and it is a vast improvment on the previous load time.

Lets hope it bags you a few more sales!

David

[RuralWeb]

Sometimes a good pruning works wonders!