website too slow

hi, I'm new

I made a website using Swishmax, which I like a lot. It saves the files as .swf. Anyway it's just an easy to use flash program. But my point is that after making my uncles website a customer of his complained that it was 'crazy' how long it took to load up.

I wanted to make the wesite calm and relaxing and I'd like to ask for your opinions on the loading time and also after posting this on another board (not a web creation board) they also said it was slow and generally the website was boring, which wasnt nice to hear.

Anyway, I thought I'd come here and ask for some advice from people in the know. The link to the website is below. My uncle is a tailor, btw.

www.tailoratdrum.co.uk

looks best at 1024 x 768 resolution and above.

Thanks

Jamie

The site needs to load over 4MB. You need to remember that a lot of people are still on dial-up, and for an average 56k modem, that takes an awful long time to load. After seven seconds they'll go somewhere else.

The music is a pain: people don't want to hear it. Remember those on dial-up as well. And on trying to close your site, it hung my browser. Not good.

If you want a calm and relaxing site, then think about a suitable colour scheme; greens, yellows, pastels. Complement the colours in prominent photos. Use soft landscapes or plants as a backdrop image. Put rounded corners on display panels/menus etc.

There's a million and one ways to go.

Hello,

Yes, the load time is quite long - I waiting about 3-4 minutes for everything to load, which is quite a long time all things considered. Most people won't want have a long enough attention span to wait for it to load.

The reason the site loads so slow is due to the amount of photographs on the page.

One thing I would suggest is to take out those image/zoom transitions, they have an interesting effect, but I am not sure they are needed in the grand scheme of things. And, from the look of it, those are probably pretty large file sizes.

Remember, in web design simple is better - sure having fancy stuff is pleasing to the eye but at the cost of load times and the like it's the first thing I would cut out.

You have a couple of other options to help with initial load times:

1. Adjust your preloader to go into the site at 60% loaded and let the rest load in the background, it should be as simple as adjusting your load percentage. (although I have never used Swish before)

2. You can take this into flash and create a file that on the click of your different buttons loads an external .swf for whatever section was clicked, and add a pre-loader there to each individual section. That way the home page loads almost isntantly and then the gallery pages(with more content, can load individually)

Make sense?

Let me know how I can help.

Cheers,

Scott

thanks for your replies. It helps a lot. I'll get onto working on my site soon. At the mo I'm waiting for my new pc so have just reformatted this pc and put windows back on.

Jamie

If I removed all the effects and those pictures that appear before each page loads up would that be ok? Cause I'm worried it would kill it if I did that. I really wanted something special and dont want a boring dull website.

Jamie

It doesn't hurt to give it a try, I'd much rather see the page load in 30 seconds vs 4 minutes. And if I never saw those transitions....would I be missing out on anything crucial to my knowledge of the site...

Get my drift?

It's all about ease of use and relevancy...

yeah, good point. You post reminds me of the chinese, who would say that a piece of paper is already perfect so you must make sure that every stroke of the pen you add to it must enchance what's already there. Or something like that.

Thanks

Jamie

I never thought of myself as a philospher...but I could get used to that! :-)

Let us know if you run into any snags, we are always happy to help.

Cheers,

Scott

I've uploaded a smaller version. It's now 1.6mb compared to 4mb that is was.

http://www.tailoratdrum.co.uk/slimline/index.html

Is it still too slow to load?

Jamie

It's a heck of a lot better mate, but I bet we could optimize this puppy even more...do you have flash installed on your computer? And guess what!? I still see all of the great relevant information I need to see about the tailor, and still some cool image viewing effects and transitions. ;-)

We can adjust how your preloader works,

AND

I am going to to teach you about loading external .swf's which will decrease the load time even more. :-)

I am not sure how swish works, but can you take each of these pages - i.e. Visiting Tailor, Formal Events, etc...and publish JUST those pages as their own individual .swf?

Cheers,

Scott

Windows? You're actually going to use Windows? You do know that this is the 21st Century?

I'm glad you were joking and are really going to use Linux.

For those who know what I am talking about....

Isnt SwishMax the Flash equivelent of 'Frontpage' for HTML/ASP?

By that I mean, isnt a lot of heavy bloat added for the simplest of tasks?

I am 95% sure the codebase will contain a lot of unneeded crap that is not helping your cause here...

Enter: Flash guru..... anyone clarify my educated opinion here, as I dont know 100% without a lot of research who swishmax is aimed at and how efficient it is.

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I've never used it before....but from seeing this web site it looks like that is the case. :-)