SITE REVIEW: Bathroom

Ullo folks - another one for your feedback please!!!

http://www.ricochet.com.au/methven/

(The only page that is not up is the about us page)

WOW!!! Great job!! I love it. Very nice layout and the color scheme works perfectly! I have to say even the picture fits in nicely (all be it a bit corny). It did however take a few momments to load, perhaps because it is comming all the way from convict land j/p

haha ya cheeky bugger!!



I like the style also - I hope it didnt take too long to load tho. I made all the images gif's so they would be smaller.

Thanks

Is that aussie for good lookin'?



Do you use photoshop? Because a lot of images are smaller in jpg format if you 'save for web' and a lot are smaller in gif format, it all depends what kind of picture.

Hrmm I looked over your images and they all seem fairly small, must be the distance between down under and new york.

yeah i used photoshop - i used the save for web "save as HTML" i found it was better quality and smaller files with a gif.

I usually prefer webpages that extend and subtract according to the screen resolution but this one still looks good i think.

So your in NY huh. Whats the weather like? Its just coming into Spring here although you wouldnt know - it bloody rained all weekend!

I looked around and I don't see any save as HTML option...hrmmm....do you have the original sized picture of that girl? I'd like to see what some of my saved sizes look like.

You did do a pretty good job for a static sized page,

oh and you don't have AOL IM by any chance (bad joke!: Aussie On Line?)?

Amazing job, the colors, the layout, the fonts.

It also took a while to load for me also though, but it looks like almost everything except for the paragraph and the copyright is an image... that left menu could be text... I know it looks better as a graphic, but you may want to spare a little on the bandwidth.

I also just wanted to note that I hate Frontpage... overall I'm very impressed it did as good as it did, but there are still little issues that bug me like when it does stuff like this:

yeah i know what you mean - it does spit out a bit of extra HTML although the actual page size is only an average of 20kb each.



So.. now I just ask people to rate the time that it took for the page to fully load -

a) took ages - by now i would have closed it and moved on

b) took a little time but not enough to make me annoyed

c) loaded fine for me

I'd have to rate the loading time at a B. The page looks great, though!

Very nice, has a personal touch that I like. A sort of simplicity I try to do but seem to fail at. *Smiles* I wouldn’t mind seeing a rollover on the top menus just for fun. Although it’ll only add to the loading time you could try to play with it a bit. It’s all so static. Change them to blue when you rollover??

Still, very clean and very pleasant to look at. I like it a lot.

I'm a patient person... and it was slow enough that it annoyed me a little, but not enough to say screw it. I saved the page off, and looked at it. It's 140kb. That's heavyweight class for a website... average is usually about 60kb I think, and if you can come up with an awesome site in under 20kb, consider yourself lucky! Anyway, I also wanted to point out that the bulk of the images will be cached in any browser so only the first hit gets the brunt of it. The rest and any new page using the same design should only need maybe 10-20kb.

Initial load time:
1. IE - 31.7 seconds
2. <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/" target="_blank">Firebird</a> - 26.9 seconds
3. Netscape - 25.1 seconds

thanks tierra, do you guys have any suggestions for making the site smaller in size? I know its pretty heavy on the graphics i am not used to making sites this way - so any hints for compressing files further with photoshop would be very helpful!

well, photoshop's default quality settings usually aren't the absolute best for compression (after all, a product that creates crap quality images isn't going to sell), but they are set for the most effecient. You could turn down the quality when you "save for web", but your page will still be maybe 100kb at pretty low settings (you don't want to go lower than that). As for other options, like I pointed out about making your second menu in the middle text rather than images. If you don't want to do that, I suggest an image map and save the menu as all one image (that way the browser doesn't have to send out as many requests). The area above the black menu is all one image, but because it's a "scanline" texture, you could crop it to however many pixels wide it is by 2 pixels hieght, then use a table definition to repeat the image in a background. Other than that, it really just has to do with the fact that you used Photoshop for the design, but didn't think about what areas can really just be done with HTML/CSS, and they just have an image instead.

yeah thinking about it now there are a lot of areas I could delete the image and just use the same colour as a background in that particular cell. I will try that and see how low it goes.

I am not sure how to do the image maps you mentioned.

cheers
Rose

the image maps wouldn't save you any size (well, maybe now that I think about it, but not much), but it will help it load faster.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=U ... gle+Search