Overtech Technologies

How can I improve on http://www.overtechtechnologies.com ? Other than the title.. I am making a custom theme for it and will take in all considerations.

Nice easy to read and appealing design.

Load-time is way up - tried in IE6, NS7, MZ1.3 and all same thing - nothing happen for 15 -20 seconds (I'm on dedicated cable) and many will believe there is something wrong and not wait.

3 external CSS, 9 Javascripts, 13 tables > The browser must render almost all of these before loading any content. Sorry that's extremely bad design, especially the use of 13 tables.

2 table great, 3 good, 4 fair > but 13 it's redesign time.

your CCS is also extrmely heavy (one way to reduce this define all links attributes identical - a link should look like a link not a pile of different styles).

and you should dump a few JavaScripts or at least conjoining a few into more manageable loads.

many of your meta tags are useless - dropping them will help improve load time.

keep charset=ISO-8859-1
KEYWORDS" CONTENT="but with only about 5 phrases "actually on the page
DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="We Build Software No One Else Can!
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">

dump the rest

The file size of your mainpage is only 40K that should load lickidity-split but even when cached it still takes about 10 sec.

Hmmm my browser crashed on all 3 attempts to visit this website!

Using IE6 Windows XP.. Should'nt be any problems!!

Loading time is much too long!

We're down to 1 external CSS file (one of the files I discovered was completely useless) . Also all the javascript files are embedded right into the main code now (no external files) - except those which are illegal for us to include directly into the code (namely: ad code)

As for the tables issue, that is a theming issue however a web browser DOES NOT need to interpret everything inside a table before it displayed - it merely needs to know how much space everything inside the table will occupy before the table is displayed - which I thought wasn't an issue until I took a look at the translator icons - they were individual images and the browser couldn't figure out how to place the icons until the entire page loaded (which caused the outrageous load times). I replaced all those little icons which were 5-10k each with a single 5k image map. I have had a couple of people check out to see if the site loads noticably faster and they say it loads nearly instantaneously now.

Let me know if you're still having long loading times. Granted the tables issue wasn't the culpret here however we are going to recode the portal hopefully by the end of the summer to eliminate superflous table use.

I ditched 1 javascript mainly because people hated what it did (the image fading for the "cool sites" block). It was a lengthy script (probably a kilobyte or so) so it was removed.

I disagree with dumping the meta tags to improve load time. I mainly disagree with it because if we do not include those tags, some users will be unable to visit our site (parental controls, language settings etc.). However the keywords list could use a bit of trimming so we have our search engine guy working on that now.

May I inquire as to what you mean by "a link should look like a link not a pile of different styles"?

Dave
- Chief Webmaster, Overtech Technologies

I am pretty certain this has to do with the JAVA news ticker at the top of the page.

May I ask what JAVA Virtual Machine you are using? (Sun, Microsoft...?).

I ask because users of the Sun Java Virtual Machine and MSIE 6 on Windows XP have experienced extreme instability of MSIE once they began using it (not just with our site, but with many others as well). The Microsoft JVM is far more stable and I suggest if you do not have to visit sites that require use of Sun's JVM, that you change MSIE's settings to use the Microsoft JVM. The ticker is a third party script plus not many people seem to be using the Sun JVM on Windows at this point so we will not be looking to find an alternate solution to bypass the deficiencies of the Sun JVM on Windows XP.

Dave
- Chief Webmaster, OvertechTechnologies.com

Agree - with your assessment. Tables however were invented to arrange text in a meaningful fashion - the web (with the advent of imagery and dynamic content) grew far faster than anyone had imagined, and property displaying conventions were slow to caught up.

I higher recommend switch your core design to CSS2 which would allow a robust site as yours to be enjoyed by the mass.

Remember that although you can imform posters here that they could change/prove their Java console is find "for a hobby site" - but you will not have that dialogue with your targeted website visitors.

If you don't design with these people in mind - they will have similar problems - a walk away. And you will never know.

Reduce the tables or CSS2 are really your only options - for a successful website anyway.

Good luck!;)

That's a good point you made about the JAVA stuff. We have since removed the news ticker.

- Dave