What can I change to help my website load more smoothly?

www.bestknownsolutions.com

When it comes up, each individual object looks like it loads separately - you can just about see the entire sequence of development events. Is there a way to make it all show up close to the same time?

2nd question - I use objects rather than text whenever I can because it's such a hassle to get my text to show up properly in all the different browsers. Objects, on the other hand, show up great. Is that part of why my website comes up so slowly? Are there other problems with using objects instead of text (like how search engines look at my page?)?

There is no way to control how fast your page loads except to use the smallest-bandwidth (file size) images you can and live with the result. People with slower connections will always see a page load sequentially like that.

If you have images instead of text, yes they will load more slowly than text. Search engines cannot read them, either, but you can set alt tags to contain the content of the text-as-object and that will mitigate that problem somewhat.

Spinny is correct, you want to use only those images you have to because search engines cannot read them, which means you wont get found on google. The more text you have on your site, the faster your site will load and the easier it will be for you to get found on google.

Thanks! I'm off to set alt tags.

Setting alt tags is a good idea when you have images. It also helps search engines find you better. However, your page will still load slowly until you get rid of a bunch of images and replace them with text. I would stay away from optimizing the images because it can degrade your images so they are unreadable (assuming your text is actually an image file). The best thing is text, text, text and position the text with CSS so you get it to look exactly how you want it.

Paula, I noticed you're using Visual Site Designer for your site. Are you still having problems with text using that tool? As I recall you can position text boxes pretty precisely, and you'd be able to ditch several graphics in the process which would speed up page load immensely.

I'm using browershots.org to see my page in Firefox. The only line of text I really have is the page title, and according to the screenshot, the title is now two lines, and the last word, "Solutions," appears right on top of my menu. Not good.

My concern, even with the ability to specifically place text using VSD, is the "overrun" issue in Firefox.

I do not use, nor am I familiar with, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, right?). Would using this address the problem I am seeing? If so, I will figure out a way to figure it out (and I would welcome any suggestions on how to start).

In the meantime, I will use the alt function to get something on the page the search engines will recognize.

Yes, CSS is exactly what you are looking for. You should definitely know how to use it since it involves positioning. However, if you are using VSD, then I am not sure how easy if at all you can integrate CSS since its a visual editor. I always recommend the html editor, then you can pair that up nicely with CSS.

Well, the good news is that I was premature in my assessment of Firefox. The browsershot image was for Firefox/Ubuntu. Firefox 3.6 using Windows XP looks fine.

I will try to simply change some of my objects to text and see what happens. I will report on progress. Thank you, Eric & Spinny!

As always, you are welcome.