Tips To Creating A Fast Loading Website

Website design is an art and is definitely not something that you can learn overnight. With the ever increasing popularity of Web 2.0, more and more stress is being laid on creating a fast loading website. In order to create a fast loading website, you will need to consider certain aspects or elements of website design and development. Here are some tips that will help you to design fast loading web pages:

Tip#1: One of the biggest reasons for slow loading of a website is the use of too many graphics or images. Of course, use of images can enhance the overall appearance of your website and hence, you should use them but minimize over usage. If you check the home page of Yahoo or Google or even a busy website like eBay then you will find that there are very little or no images. Here is a comparison:

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You can see from the above two screen shots that
• Yahoo: One flash file, one image, and 4 thumbnails on their home page. It takes 1 second for this website to load
• Awimaway: This website has 1 720x300 flash banner/header, 1 flash world map, 3 images, and one button image. It takes almost 2 minutes for this website to load.

Tip#2: If you have to put images on your website then it is always better to have them optimized for web. You can save them in optimized JPEG or GIF format and even reduce the size without hampering the resolution using Photoshop. Another option is to reduce the use of too many colors because the lesser the colors, the smaller the size. If you are using flash banner then you can always replace it with an animated GIF banner, which will be smaller in size and easier to upload. You can create GIF animations using Photoshop and Imageready.

Tip#3: If you are using HTML for coding your website then you can either use tables HTML or XHTML or use HTML tables in a creative manner. The good thing about tables is that they will load extremely fast and can be used for creating navigation, menus, and for home page layout as well. Here is a Dreamweaver screenshot of creating a table in HTML:

Tip#4: Use simple icons. Whether you create a small icon or a big icon, both will capture the attention of visitors and make your website look good. But big and bulky icon images can take a lot of time to load so it is always better to use small icons instead. For example: Pixar Animation studios have big icons on their homepage. Of course, it is fine for them because the company is into making animation movies but it is a no-no for any other company or business website.

Tip#5: Use a solid color background instead of an image based background. If you have an image in your background then it will take too much time to upload. Instead use a solid color and use images within the web pages.

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