Website question

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Posted By: <b>Bryan Long</b><p>Quick question for everyone:<br /><br />I have been working on a new webiste for some time now and finally I am starting to get somewhere. As someone who knows nothing about html coding I think I am now starting to teach myself. I am using geocities - hardly any memory given - but the major problem is that I keep going past my bandwidth just updating the site. Is the only way I can get past this is by buying a site myself and not using a free one? I hate having to pay for one since I'm not really selling anything at this point. I just want to show off my cards. If anyone knows a different route I can take I would appreciate it.<br />BTW - if you want you can check out what I have done so far by going to:<br /><br />www.geocities.com/trib011<br /><br />It also seems to take forever to load images - what am I doing wrong here?<br /><br><br>.

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Posted By: <b>davidcycleback</b><p>You can get your own website with more than enough space through most major internet servers, and it's not terribly expensive. My site is based through earthlink.net, which is also my email server. If you plan on having your own site longterm, you are going to want to get a site through a major server just so you have enough space. Though major servers like earthlink you can get more space than you will ever need-- having tons of big pictures will be no problem.<br /><br />For your own non-geocities site, you will have to learn how to make pages and upload and stuff. Adobe Pagemill is a good program for designing pages, linking them together, adding links, background colors, adding images and stuff, and is used by beginners. You can get the Pagemill cd on ebay for cheap, though you want to make sure you get the guide book with it.<br /><br />You may wish to use geocities for a short while at least, just so you can practice doing html and seeing what looks nice. If you later start your own site somewhere else, you can place a link on the geocities to your new site. For a first timer, it would probably would be maddingly overwelming to try and create a MastroNet-quality site right away. I say fooling around on geocities is a good way to start, even if you plan on someday having the next MastroNet.<br /><br />I couldn't access your site, but as far as load time and limited access goes, you may be using images too large. Make them smaller in size, and you will likely have fewer troubles with access and loading.<br /><br />A common mistake of new web page makers is to use montorously large images-- especially on the main page. If it takes 10 minutes for the main page to load, the average visitor isn't going to wait for the main page to load.

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Posted By: <b>Neil</b><p>For my corporation we use <a href="http://www.valueweb.com/" target="_new" rel="nofollow">http://www.valueweb.com/</a>... Cheap and the email service does a great job removing spam...<br /><br />Neil

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Posted By: <b>davidcycleback</b><p>Bryan, just got a quick peak at your site. Nice design. The nice thing about later moving your site to a different server is that any geocities html/graphics you create now can be used on your later site.

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Posted By: <b>Brian McQueen</b><p><br />Hi Bryan,<br /><br />I took a quick look at your site. Your problem with images loading is a simple one. Many of your images across your site and especially on the n28 page are 378-385KB in filesize. That is HUUUUGE. And the funny thing is, proportionally speaking, those aren't even large images. Those images should really be no larger than 30-40K. If you get that corrected, your images will load quicker AND you won't have that bandwidth issue as often. <br /><br />Also, another suggestion would be to use smaller images (thumbnails) on the page that open up into larger ones in a different page. That will save some space as well since you won't have a bunch of images hogging up bandwidth on your page. Keep in mind, the larger the filesize, the more bandwidth is taken up by someone accessing that page and opening/uploading your images.<br /><br />Hope that helps.<br /><br />Brian

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Posted By: <b>Brian McQueen</b><p>Using Pagebuilder or some other "wizard" for building a webpage produces a lot of extra "junk code" that isn't necessary. That extra code is something that your browser has to "read" in order to open your page and that will add to bandwidth being sucked up.I took a look at the source code you used and it appears that you coded that by hand so that's a good start. Your best bet when using Geocities is to manually code everything in HTML, CSS, etc... yourself as that's how you'll have the best results for loading times. <br /><br />CSS is really the best option as the HTML "table" method also produces a lot of code that can be tougher to read for browsers. It uses the least amount of bandwidth overall.<br /><br />