Posted by Brian Cryer on 07/07/06 08:31

"Chris Tomlinson" <anon@anon.com> wrote in message
news:Q%brg.97357$wl.87256@text.news.blueyonder.co.uk...
> "Brian Cryer" <brian.cryer@127.0.0.1.ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:UoidnRnyUszWpTDZRVnygw@pipex.net...
<snip>
>> I looked at your page, but I'm still not quite sure I understand what you
>> mean by "horizontal divs". Wait a minute, do you mean that were you to
>> take your "highstreet view" and chop it up into a number of individual
>> images and then load each of those individually? If so, I don't see any
>> reason why it wouldn't work.
>
> Hi Brian, yes that's right -- in fact that *is* what you were looking at,
> but we did it so cunningly you couldn't tell. ;) The issue is getting
> the divs to load in the right order.

Are you sure? because I downloaded the "highstreet" as a single image.

>> Be aware that to use JavaScript to control the load order of images means
>> that your visitors who don't have JavaScript enabled probably won't see
>> anything.
>
> We are already relying on that as it's less than 1% of people now.
>
>> It might be worth reconsidering what you are trying to do. Currently your
>> "highstreet image" is 368KB, that's big, so I can understand your wanting
>> to do something about it. Even if you ignore the length of time it takes
>> to download the image, having the horizontal scroll bar is undesirable.
>> Would thumbnail views be better? Click the thumbnail to view the shop
>> entrance or
>
> We appreciate your feedback, but don't you feel static thumbnails would
> completely lose the virtual 'scroll' along the street that the user can
> do?

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
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.)

Something else that might help (with loading times at least) would be to
reduce the size (height and width) of the image.

> Broadband is only getting more common.
>
>> enter? You could also try changing the jpg to use progressive encoding
>> (in my experience this can make a big difference with gif files although
>> IE still seems to wait until it has finished loading the jpg before
>> displaying it regardless of whether its progressive or not).
>
> They already use progressive which looks very good in Firefox, but we
> agree IE doesn't take advantage :(
>
>> I know its not what you asked, but your page took a long time to load. It
>
> Can we ask your connection speed? How long did it take to load roughly?

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.

> What would you suggest instead of the 3 tables on the page? Do these
> really add a lot to the load time do you think?

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.
--
Brian Cryer
www.cryer.co.uk/brian

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