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Other Stuff - odds and ends
This is the official 'under construction' page, since it's where all the odds and ends go as well as the suggestions from visitors that didn't fit into any of the categories for other pages.
Choice of web browser
Different browsers render pages at different speeds. But as you cannot exert control over which browser your visitors use, there is little point is discussing advantages and disadvantages of particular browsers. Face it, no matter how many times you say "This site best viewed with whatever" your visitors will keep using whatever they prefer.
So, I'll mention only one browser difference that I feel is significant to the speed of your site as perceived by visitors - tables. Internet Explorer renders tables as the table content is delivered. Netscape 4 renders a table only after all the table content is delivered. If your pages use a large single table for layout purposes, then Netscape users will perceive your pages as much slower. The partial solution is - wherever feasible - put content 'above the fold' in its own separate table so there's something to see while the rest of the page loads.
'Easy' Design tools and really bad code
Rumour has it that if we could rid the Internet of the <font> tag (and rely solely on CSS to specify our fonts and font attributes), it would save so much bandwidth globally that the entire Internet would run 10 times faster for all of us.
While that might be a mild overstatement, it does point out that some WYSIWYG page creation tools and 'easy' design tools tend to produce far more actual code than is ever necessary for the page to be generated. If this looks familiar ...
<font face="arial"><font color="green"></font><font color="green"></font><font color="green"><font size="1">
... not only has your editor generated excess code, and slowed down the performance of your web site, but you have given yourself a future site maintenance headache. Think about what you will need to do when you want 100 pages like that to be red instead of green?
Using a 'style' to define how text appears is not difficult to learn - at least the most commonly used parts of it. You might want to spend a few minutes browsing the Rich in Style
site or the W3School site to look into the time-saving aspects of styles and CSS, it's well worth the effort.
And if this 'code' looks familiar ...
<tr valign="top">
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=8></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=142></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=42></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=25></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=29></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=120></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=4></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=150></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=8></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=211></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=4></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=11></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=1></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=38></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=80></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=2></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=125></td>
<td><img src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/c.gif" height=1 width=1></td>
</tr>
... it's time to understand that while WYSIWYG editors can create 'layout' easily, there's often a whole bunch of redundant (or inoperable) code written for you as well. And that extra code increases the size of your page files, increases the time it takes for them to download and render, and last but not least gives you code that is extremely hard to understand later if your ever look into the 'raw' html.
More other stuff - banners
If you need them - OK. If you can avoid them - even better. If at all possible, have the banner images stored on your own web host rather than loaded remotely. Many banner providers run heavily overloaded servers that cause your own page to appear slow. Avoid them if you can.
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