Attention David F

[Christiaan]

David,

I have downloaded the Serif Web Plus program and rebuilt my site but I am
not finished though. My online booking system isnt working and I have added
drop down menus when you mouse over the towns. Look for the thin blue line on
my provincial maps and mouse over them. If I remember correctly I promised
that I will let you know when I have published so have a look please. Please
allow for the home page to download properly.

www.siyayasa.com

Christiaan

 

[DavidF]

Hi Christiaan,

Thanks for posting the link. You have been busy...

Nice new design, though I must admit that I really liked the "African print"
that you used in your Publisher built site.

For what it is worth, I would work on the loading time. Your home page took
more than 4 minutes...almost 5, to load on my dial-up connection. If I was a
first time visitor, I doubt that I would have stayed around while it loaded.
You might ask the WP experts in their forum about how to speed it up. Is the
slow loading typical behavior for a Web Plus site?

One of the main reasons you switched was it had become very difficult for
you to manage your large Publisher site. Have you found it easier to manage
with WP? Does WP allow you to do incremental uploading? Having switched from
Publisher, what do you like best about working with Web Plus?

Thanks again.

DavidF

 

[Christiaan]

Hi David,

I must admit, I am working on three sites at the moment so yes I have been
busy. I also think that the extra green background is killing the African
print a bit so I will rectify that. I have read through the serif forum and
no one is complaining about the loading times and WP does the compresion of
images automatically. My home page has got a lot of code on it but I will see
what I can do about the loading time.

Managing a large site with WP is a hell of a lot easier than with publisher.
You click on publish to the web and you tick the pages you want to upload. If
you are doing an update, you tick the pages that you want to update and then
you click on incremental publish. WP verifies the files and updates the
changes you have made. I updated 4 pages this morning and the file
verification and the update took about 2 minutes.

What do I like best about WP, hell where should I start.

With the drop down menus on my provincial pages, I managed to decrease my
site with about 70 pages. I made the drop down menus with codes that I got
from dynamicdrive.com.

Almost every shape that you create with WP can be reshaped with nodes and
the colour tools for filling, lines and backgrounds are great. You can create
and add your own colours as you wish.

You can decide whether you want to preview a single page or your whole site
in IE or in FF which I installed recently. There is no limitations on form
design and you have access to serif web resources that provides objects like
RSS feeds, e-commerce and blogging that you can insert to your site for free.

WP also provides quite a few website and e-mail templates that really looks
great and insert functions for java script and flash objects. The design and
layout checker is also really great. I can go on and on but for $40 you
should try it. I downloaded the WP10 and it works perfectly. WP also brought
down my site size from 20megs to 1.8 megs.

I did pick up a small problem though, my program crashed soon after I
downloaded it but I downloaded it through a download manager so I could just
repair it and the problem seems solved. I think you will enjoy WP because it
is still a bit of a challenge to work with.

Regards,

Christiaan

 

[DavidF]

Christian,

Thanks for the report. It is interesting and educational to hear the
comparison from a person that had built a 200+ page site in Publisher, and
then switched to Web Plus.

Don't put much weight on my comment about the African print...that has
nothing to do with function, and I was just saying that I did like your old
design with that print. It is not saying that your new design is not
ok...and perhaps better.

As to the load time, I did notice a lot of errors being thrown on the status
bar while it loaded, and it seemed associated with the Google analytics or
other scripts running, but that may not have had anything to do with it. I
get by with a dial-up connection at my home because I have broadband at my
office...too cheap to pay for high speed both places. But this does afford
me the opportunity to text how fast my pages load for all those people that
have dial-up. Perhaps that is not as important as it used to be. MSFT sure
seems to think so, and I think many designers have just given up on the
dial-up user. Perhaps you have gotten no comments from the Serif forum
because no one is using dial-up? Perhaps you can find someone else with
dial-up to test your site.

My estimate of load time was a rough estimate as I just counted in my head
as it loaded. However, that is what I always do when I try to assess the
relative load speed of pages submitted to this group etc. I did find a site
that gives you some more "objective" data on the loading. You might use it
to get at least a relative comparison against other pages and sites:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
I don't know how accurate it is, but you can try it.

Thanks again for the report. I think I will stay with Publisher 2000 for my
site for now, but I could see why other Publisher users would want to
switch. Web Plus does seem to offer a lot of features that you don't find in
Publisher. Good luck to you.

DavidF

 

[Mike Koewler]

David,

Interesting reading his report.

From websiteoptimization.com:
Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 297.46 seconds
28.8K 151.43 seconds
33.6K 130.57 seconds
56K 80.50 seconds
ISDN 128K 28.40 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 7.40 seconds

Mike

 

[DavidF]

Hiya Mike,

I hoped that you would drop by and see this thread. Christiaan is a happy
camper! You are an expert with WP and I have always appreciated and valued
your perspective, but it was very interesting getting his perspective.

I am curious though. I connect at 31.2 and my real world results were at
least twice as long as indicated by his report. Why do you suppose that is?
Also, is Christiaan's load time "typical" of WP sites with comparable number
of images, text and page size?

How is the garden going?

DavidF

 

[Rob Giordano \(Crash\)]

I've been messin about with WebPlus 10 (Natasha had an offer a few weeks ago
and it was cheep so I bought it). No, op's download time is not typical, at
least not compared to my one test web I did with WP. I suspect the dl
problem (or at least partly) is due to a scripting issue.

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rob Giordano
Microsoft MVP Expression

 

[DavidF]

Thanks Rob. I did get a lot of script errors showing up in the status bar as
the page was loading, especially with Google analytics...

DavidF

 

[Mike Koewler]

David,

I had no idea you were on a 33.6 modem, I figured it was at least a 56K.
Also, I notice if I use Explorer to check a site it always takes
considerably longer to load than Mozilla does. And I notice sites that
use Google Analytics (or Serif's analytics for that matter) also seem to
take a while longer.

www.stjamesotv.com is one site that has more stuff on the Home page than
most the sites I build, although www.tinkscafe.com has a few more images.

One thing Christiaan can do, and I just noticed it now, is to change his
preferences so the images are not saved as png files. In WP, if you
place a photo as its same size, WP exports it whatever it is named.
However, if you resize it and you don't change the defaults it gets
converted to the png. Just changing to a jpg would make his site a lot
smaller.

I've transplanted all but six (out of 50)hot peppers. I have another
dozen or so upstairs in the germinator. If you want to see a plant that
produces the world's hottest pepper, see www.valleycat.net/Bhut.jpg
Another very hot one is www.valleycat.net/7pod.jpg

My potatoes are doing great - I have six of them that are over three
feet tall. Four of them have been growing about eight inches a week in
the last two weeks. I'm hoping to get them to at least six feet high and
get 40 pounds of spuds from a 4.4 ounce seed potato. I planted 57
cucumbers but very few of them are up yet - it's been mostly cloudy or
raining plus chilly the last few days, and the basil has not sprouted
either. My lettuce and Mizuna love the weather, though.

I'm waiting for the tomatoes and eggplants to get large enough to
transplant. They have not grown as fast as would have like, though I
probably should have started them about a month earlier.

Bought a LED light panel yesterday. I had bought a smaller one last week
and stuck it over a tomato plant upstairs. The plant thrives under it.
Alas, it only covers about two square feet. The one I bought yesterday
is supposed to cover 6.5 sq.ft. But get this, it uses only 43 watts of
power. I can run it 16 hours a day for a little over $2.00 per month.
Plus, it produces only red and blue light which is what plants use in
photosynthesis.

It's strange how I hated working in the garden when I lived at home but
now am addicted!

Mike

 

[DavidF]

Hiya Mike,

I do have a 56k modem, but because of the distance from the switching
station, bad phones lines, bad breath...who knows, I connect at only 31.2.
And yes, it does make it a form of torture to wait for some websites to
load. It has taught me how to multitask...

Both of your home pages load relatively quickly for me, and more importantly
load as I would expect and hope. By that I mean, the text loads quickly and
it is only the images that take time. This fits the general rule that the
more images you have the longer it takes for a page to load. I was concerned
that the text was waiting for images, and that is not the case in your sites
at least. It seems to me that if the visitor has some text to read very
quickly, then that will keep them on your page while the rest of the images
load.

I did notice that Christiann's site was all PNGs and also wondered about
that. I had noticed PNGs in a few examples you had provided before and
wondered if that contributed to the problem. My experience has been that
JPGs generally are a smaller file size than PNGs for equal quality images. I
am glad to hear you do have the option in WP. I also have noticed that I can
get more legible maps with GIF files and can really crank down on the file
size by using only 64 colors or even less sometimes. The small writing
almost always is easier to read in a GIF version and the maps that
Christiaan uses seemed easier to read as GIFs in his Publisher version of
his site. Anyway, the *excess* loading time of Christiaan's page is
apparently not because of WP as much as it is because of the reasons you
cited. Thanks for the clarification.

Wow...thanks for the garden update. It sounds like your potato tire garden
idea is working well. All that physical work will keep you young and sane.
;-)

DavidF

 

[Mike Koewler]

David,

I'm glad my pages load decently. WP also allows me to use gif files. One
nice thing I like about it is that I really don't have to optimize my
images - WP will place them at 96 dpi.

I sort of gave up on tires - quite by accident. The first ones I got
were plenty large enough and without thinking, I placed them side by
side. Two weeks ago I picked up a couple more and they were too large.
Since I'm mixing in potting soil and peat with cow manure with dirt from
the garden, I was using way more stuff than I needed. Instead, I bought
some 1/4 inch wire mesh (3 feet tall) and put it inside the tire. I
still have a diameter of 18" which is more than enough but I don't have
to worry about getting rid of the tires in a few years. I'll try to post
some pics this weekend after I add some more dirt.

Mike

 

[DavidF]

Hey Mike,

Actually the Compress Graphics tool in Pub 2003 and 2007 will take care of
resampling and resizing images to 96 dpi in Publisher. One nice feature is
the Compress Graphics tool also gives the user the option of optimizing the
image for web, print or commercial...three different dpi levels. We tend to
forget in this web group that Publisher is primarily a DTP with web building
as just one part of the program.

DavidF