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pageoneresults -> RE: Does Size Matter?? (5/8/2003 14:06:40)
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quote:
Can you expand on that idea?
Hello Mike_R, actually, my statement was...
quote:
Since I work strictly with css and absolute positioning, page weight is not an issue.
The css is pretty much self explanatory. I' ve removed all presentational markup and now use external css, one file controlling every page of the web site. I' ve got some sites with over 300 pages.
In regards to absolute positioning, I am able to position my content right after the opening <body> tag. My html might look like this...
<body>
<div>
<h1>Heading</h1>
<p>Opening paragraph</p>
<ul>
<li>Some list items</li>
</ul>
<p>Another paragraph</p>
<ol>
<li>Some ordered list items</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div><include>Footer</div>
<div><include>Left navigation</div>
<div><include>Top navigation</div>
</body>
I' ve trimmed out some of the code just for ease of discussion. Notice that I use mostly <div>s in my coding. I only use tables where necessary (tabular data). The browser still needs to render the <div>s just as it does with <table>s. But, you' ll notice that my core content (what the visitor sees) is right up there after the <body> tag.
Browsers render pages from left to right, top to bottom. Since I am absolutely positioning major elements on my page like top nav, left nav and my core content, I am able to present the browser (and indexing spider) with my core content first. This means that when the visitor hits that page, they see content first while the rest of what is below the content is being rendered by the browser.
Take a look at our SEO Consultants Directory. On a really slow connection, you will probably see a tiling page background across the top of the page and then the visible content (text) first. Then you' ll notice that other elements start to appear on the screen. This is the browser rendering the page from left to right, top to bottom. It has already read our style sheet because it is externally linked from the <head> section. Anything within the <head> is rendered prior to anything after the <body>.
When you are using <table>s and standard web page layout, there is usally a fair amount of markup code that appears right after the <body> tag. This code has to be rendered first by the browser before it gets to your opening <p> tag. If there are a lot of nested tables, this could take a little bit of time on a 56k modem connection leaving the visitor to wait while the presentational elements are being loaded, hence the page weight issue.
In reference to your images, Photoshop is an excellent program. But, I' ve found that if you do not fully understand how to use it for optimizing images for the web, you may not be fully optimizing them. The default setting in Photoshop for .jpg is a quality of 99. Way too much for the web and 72 dpi monitor resolutions. I use a program called Fireworks for optimizing images for the web. Most of my .jpgs are set at quality levels of 80 or below depending on the subject matter.
For example, a quality 99 setting from Photoshop might produce an image that is 26k in size. If you reduce that quality setting to 80, the size may be 14k. Big difference and no loss in image quality. Once you get below the quality of 80, then you will start to see degradation of the image (depending on the subject matter in the image).
If your pages are close to the 100k mark, or even the 60k mark, you may want to consider breaking the pages into smaller more compact ones. If your images are making up more than 50% of your pages size, then you may want to consider maximizing or optimizing them further to reduce their file size.
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