Page size reduction

[Memoire]

Interested how to maintain the details, images and functions of my home page as it is, but reduce the file size and improve loading speed? Since adding rollovers on some buttons the site has become more bulky, but I would like to keep such effects.

[Sualdam]

Just looking at your buttons, each GIF is at least 2.0-2.5kb. Since you have a rollover and click state as well, that means each button totals around 7.5kb.

You have 15 navigation buttons on the left - that's 112kb in total. It'd take 30 seconds just to download the button images. And that doesn't include the smaller (approx 1.5kb per image) rollovers in the main body, or the actual content.

I had a quick try and you could compress your GIFs to 32 colour and keep the quality (they seem to be 256 colour at the moment - that's too high). You can get a 2.5kb GIF down to 1.5kb approx this way. A 30-40% reduction like this could help.

You might also look at alternative rollver effects that don't need three images.

[Narasinha]

My gosh, what a lot of tables! I think your home page could definitely benefit from optimizing the HTML to use CSS rather than all of the deeply nested tables.

As Sualdam mentioned, optimizing the graphics will help with download size quite a bit.

One other thing that I noticed is that the entire page is set up as part of a <form...> </form> container. I don't think this affects download time, or any other functionality, but I found it quite odd, as I didn't see any form elements on the page.

Also, your rollovers did nothing at all on mouseover in Opera (7.21, Windows). I didn't check in Internet Explorer. It's not terribly difficult to do rollovers using CSS rather than JavaScript.

Best Regards,
Narasinha