Comments?

[Lady Blade]

Hi Guys,

Thought I'd see what people think of a site I have been working on.

A couple of warnings .. the site has been designed for 1024x768 res (there is a popup stating this that needs to be oked in Mozilla and Netscape before you can navigate the rest of the site)

It is also fairly highly graphical in nature so I will be interested in how slowly it loads for those on a dial up connection.


Salamander Towne Square (http://www.salamander-ts.com)

Thanks
Blade

[The Visitor]

um... I get one page that talks about the various things one can do at the Town Square, but no navigation to actually do them. Is this what I'm supposed to be getting?

[Lady Blade]

Hi Visitor,

You should see a JavaScript navigation extending down the left hand side of the screen.

Not sure why this isn't showing for you.

Anyone have any ideas?

Blade

[Nino]

It takes a very long time to load on dial-up.

It looks very, very nice.

I had no problem seeing the navigation images on the left side (eventually).

[The Visitor]

Originally posted by Lady Blade
Hi Visitor,

You should see a JavaScript navigation extending down the left hand side of the screen.

Not sure why this isn't showing for you.

Anyone have any ideas?

Blade

Mozilla Firebird running on a Linux system. 1024x768 resolution. I haven't had problems with DHTML menus in the past, and I hate JavaScript (for this very reason), so I can't make any suggestions.

[(jj)]

I'm running Mozilla Firebird (on a Windows system) and could see the menu just fine - once it loaded. But no popups, thank you :D

Very nice looking site, but don't expect too many users that are on dialup. It takes way too long to load for anyone on a dialup connection to enjoy it.

[Lady Blade]

Thanks for your comments Nino and JJ.

I've gone back and further compressed all the graphics.

I'm new at this, just how much should or can one compress graphics without losing too much resolution?

Blade

[Nino]

Here is a decent article that will get you started on optimization if you're new at this:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/601


Originally posted by Lady Blade
Thanks for your comments Nino and JJ.

I've gone back and further compressed all the graphics.

I'm new at this, just how much should or can one compress graphics without losing too much resolution?

Blade

[(jj)]

I went back and it did load quicker, but still pretty slow for anyone on dialup.

It looks like you've compressed and resized most everything by quite a bit. About the only suggestion I'd have would be to make your background (slate.gif) smaller yet. A tile background can be made very small and still remain nice looking.

You've gained quite a bit of speed with just what you've done and since this is a very graphic site, most dialup users would be willing to deal with the load time.

[Atomic-Design]

I thought it was sort of annoying that every new link was opened up in a new page.

[Lady Blade]

*nods*
This particular thing has been a conundrum for me Atomic as I too find that annoying.

My users want the links to open in a new window on the chat page (so they can browse without it booting them out of the chat every time they hit on a link) but it is not required on the other pages.

The JavaScript navigation is called up for all the pages from one source. I could make a duplicate menu that did not open every page in a new window for the pages other than the chat but was reluctant to do so because the site is growing almost daily with users wanting their character profiles and additional info pages added. Me being the only one working to maintain and administer the site I was trying to minimise my work by keeping to the one menu.

Thanks for you comments
Blade