Dreamweaver CS3: Easy way to use multiple domains to host images for one website?

[AuctionHugh]

Hi, I have an issue and searching google is not helping. On a website we have created, some of the pages have about 50 graphics on each page and it means even with a fast internet connection it takes 15+ seconds to load those pages.

Using the page speed add-in with firebug it strongly suggests I spread those images around to 2-4 additional domains, as the pages will load much faster if all these image files are not all coming from the same domain.

Sounds easy enough. However, I don't have any idea in dreamweaver cs3 how to easily tell dreamweaver that the files are different places without manually typing in the path and filename.

In other words, right now to add an image to a page, I go to the properties part of the window, below the wysiwyg and code sections, and drag the bullseye to the files list on the right, to the image file, which is always inside the images folder or a subfolder there under the site root. That assumes all the images are on the same website.

Is it possible to do the same thing simply and easily if they are on another domain? Like maybe have other domains folders listed under that site?

And then when I hit publish or send to have the right files sent to the right domains?

Your thoughts on this would be appreciated.

[puamana]

Hi, I have an issue and searching google is not helping. On a website we have created, some of the pages have about 50 graphics on each page and it means even with a fast internet connection it takes 15+ seconds to load those pages.

Using the page speed add-in with firebug it strongly suggests I spread those images around to 2-4 additional domains, as the pages will load much faster if all these image files are not all coming from the same domain.

Sounds easy enough. However, I don't have any idea in dreamweaver cs3 how to easily tell dreamweaver that the files are different places without manually typing in the path and filename.

In other words, right now to add an image to a page, I go to the properties part of the window, below the wysiwyg and code sections, and drag the bullseye to the files list on the right, to the image file, which is always inside the images folder or a subfolder there under the site root. That assumes all the images are on the same website.

Is it possible to do the same thing simply and easily if they are on another domain? Like maybe have other domains folders listed under that site?

And then when I hit publish or send to have the right files sent to the right domains?

Your thoughts on this would be appreciated.

If you are on a standard linux host, that allows multiple domains to be listed under a single account (add-on domains) then you can use the same relative directory structure in your links, but all your images will still be served from the same server, so bandwidth may still be an issue.

A workaround, if you use relative links in your page links and image links would be to do a global replace on the site, code, <IMG src="../images/some.jpg"> and replace the ../ with the url to your off-site image directory. Often sofware developers fail to include functions that become more relevant as the internet develops. Perhaps you should suggest to Adobe that they modify the software to include the ability to specify an outside source for images and files. Short of that, I don't know what else to suggest... other ideas anyone?

puamana

[Bernd]

AuctionHugh have you already optimized / compressed the 50 graphics?

[AuctionHugh]

Optimized images is one of the things the page speed add-in suggested, and of course we will do that, but they were already pretty well optimized so that would not do the job. The page is loading slowly and apparently that is due to the large number of images from the same domain rather than the size of the page or slow hosting. PageSpeed makes this specific suggestion:

Parallelize downloads across hostnames
This page makes 53 parallelizable requests to www.zzzzzzzzzzzzz.com. Increase download parallelization by distributing these requests across multiple hostnames:

Puamana, I know I could do a global replace for the image paths, I am just hoping that a professional product like dreamweaver would have a more elegant solution for what must be a common problem these days.

[wige]

What sort of images are these? In other words, are you showing an image gallery, or are the images icons or navigation/menu items?

There may be other options beyond serializing (which is purely done to maximize the number of consecutive requests) the images, such as the use of sprites.

[AuctionHugh]

They are pretty much "choose this logo or this logo" for your business card type of thing.

[AuctionHugh]

nevermind I think I'll start a new thread.

[wige]

Sorry, I didn't see this thread get updated... If these are smaller logos that you are showing, I would suggest trying sprites. Especially if the page contains thumbnails, maybe using AJAX to show the full size images. This will let you cut down on the requests, without needing to distribute the images, and still allow the page to be rendered fairly quickly.

[AuctionHugh]

If you want to see what I'm talking about, the example page is here: http://www.receipts.com/attorney-law...ness-cards.htm

[wige]

ok, I definitely think this could be solved by using sprites. For example, one sprite file might be the individual cards, another would be the fonts, one for the logos, etc. This would probably reduce the number of images you are calling to less than a dozen on this page, and take care of the issue that way.