New design - Need a little help

I just created a new design for my site, and while there a lot of kinks that I am aware of I was wondering if any out there could swing around and do a test run on my site and see if they come across any flaws.

Thanks alot.

Also if you know how to solve my loading problem I would be really happy about that.

Website

Your biggest problem that I can see that would affect your load time is the amount of code you have there. You may want to scale back a few of your blog posts on the opening page (go with maybe 4 or 5.)

I haven't played with ASP.net much, but there appears to be ASP.Net code showing up in your outputted HTML. That could be a problem.

You've got an internal stylesheet inside of your body about 1/3 the way down. You should take that and make it an external CSS file. Do the same with your JScripts. It will make your site a lot easier to maintain.

The hit counter could be plain text as well...if not, at least put the width and height properties of the images in so they load quicker. It also disagrees with your Site Meter (which is in turn taking up load time and probably not providing you any useful information your domain host, through its stats pack, isn't.)

But I think your big thing would be you're using a table-based layout where a three-column DIV layout would work and work well. There's a really good layout at the link below that might get you started:

http://www.pixy.cz/blogg/clanky/css-3col-layout/

Good luck!

Before I had a tableless website but I really like the layout of my sitemap and I am not completely sure how
easy or difficult it will be to mimic that with divs.

I am curious about



Can I externalize (is that a word?) my javascript? I would really like to try that out. I have one script that is external, but I didnt create it so I never really considered it.

I no nothing about .NET code and a little about ASP, can you tell me where the net code is showing up? I can't tell the difference.

Thanks for checking it out and I agree with using divs, less code and easier to maintain. I will try to change and if you have any advice on the sitemap section, I would appreciate it.

Thanks

Yes, you can. It's really easy too.

Step 1: Open your favourite text editor, and make sure a new file is displayed (i.e. one with nothing in it).
Step 2: Copy your Javascript code/functions into the blank file.
Step 3: Save the file as (filename).js .

That's it. It's just like external CSS that way, and it actually has some impact on the load time of a site overall. I've noticed that not only do pages seem to load slightly faster with external vs. internal JScripting (although that could be just me), external JScripts are also cached if the page itself is cached and can be recalled by the browser, thus saving time from future downloads of the same script on subsequent pages.

Good luck to you!

I have google ad's on my site, if I externalize the js will it effect it in any way?

Sometimes I see noscript included with javascript and I'm not sure how to treat it. So if I also want to externalize this code, how would I do it?

You don't need to.

<noscript> contents are showed by browsers that don't support scripting. The browsers wouldn't execute the <script> elements anyway.

Therefore, if you want to show content to uber-downlevel browsers, then you can continue to use <noscript> in your XHTML pages. Don't confuse <noscript> with CSS's "display: none;" property, however.

Cheers, thanks for the advice.

So I have decided that I will change the main layout to Divs, put the poll and link sections will stay as tables, this should elp reduce the size, but my questions is...

Will it stop my page from loading so strangely?

"change the main layout to Divs" ?

Assuming that layout is acheived through divs is only marginally better than using tables for layout in the first place.

A <div> element is just a semantically neutral container element. You can use any element for "layout".

Besides, XHTML is used to describe the document... you use <div> to denote "document division", you apply layout and appearance with external stylesheets.

Thank you for the webdesign 101 lesson.

I asked a question about page loading, not for a lesson in my bad choice of words.

But thank you Guru.

It really depends on the layout as to whether tables vs. divs is better. My own personal reason behind using divs is not because the code is "marginally better", but simply because search engines seem to like it better these days (specifically Google).

The other advantage to DIVs is that you have more control over what loads first/second/third, etc. With a table, it's left-to-right, then top-to-bottom. With a div, you can say "Okay, I want my content to load first, then my left menu, then my right menu, then my top, then my footer", thus giving the user what they want to see immediately.

In other words, it may not necessarily cause your page to load that much faster, but it will give the user the illusion of such simply because what they're looking for will be presented to them first.

ADAM, you appear to have misinterpreted the purpose XHTML and table-less design.

You don't layout pages in terms of <div> elements. XHTML is just the structure of the document. All you do is apply box styling and positioning to an arbitrary element, it doesn't have to be your typical semantically neutral <div>ision element.

I have decided to stay with tables and after reading some of the replies here I have discovered that the reason my site loads funny is the javascript.

All of my javascripts are now external files, but I would like to change it and add an onload command for some of the scripts that I think are slowing down the loading process.

So how do I add an onload command to slow down only one or two scripts?

Thanks again...

One more time, please help me out..

If I want to delay the loading off all my javascript until the body has been fully loaded, what kind of script should I write?

I did a search and as far as I know I need to use an onload command, but beyond that and it is greek!