The most important thing when designing a website, is to make it load fast...People doesn't like waiting especially if your visitors have a slow connection like for instance Malta. So always keep this question in mind... How long will it take to load? Here are some tips that might be useful.
1) Try to use less images as possible.
Try simplifying the design rather than complicated ones. The most simple are the most common like Google, Amazon, Ebay and more! These normally try to avoid images as their first priority is speed. Try not using 75% images to make your website which does increase the load time. (erm erm...yes mine is a bad example but my first priority is quality as its a portfolio :))
2) Optimizing images is the key to success
Once you decided which images to use, the next thing to do is to optimise them. You can either use photoshop which does a great job in optimising images for the web or some other 3rd party program might do the job too. There are several stuff you should take care of, the extension should be either JPEG or GIF. (yes, I know I'm using PNGs for mine, they're very good for quality as they are lossless images but again my first priority is quality hehe) Less colours you use, the better ;)
3) Tables and Divs
Tables and Divs loads very fast as it is just HTML coding rather than images. Used professionally you can come up with really good results and will still look great! As you see this site is pratically made out of tables (and images) but they help to keep the images in the right place!
4) Animated GIFs.......Argh!
Try to avoid animated GIFs as much as possible. They do look kinda cool and makes the site look abit busy but does drastically increase your load time. Loads of these can be irrating to the eye so only use them when nessecary.
5) Simplification is the key!
Simple, clean and small icons are really good, design wise and load time. Simple ones normally does the trick rather than big and bulky ones unless you got a good reason why to use them.
6) Background images helps alot!
Background images really help to decrease the number of images on a page, can be used for footers and headers. like in a table or the main body like some wordpress templates to minimise load times.
7) CSS is highly recomended!
SEO wise, design wise and load time...CSS is very good to customise your site and come up with really good CSS designs. Like instead of making a 'bar' as an image, you can do it with CSS which does slice down the load time as its all Code rather than images. CSS can even make site modifications easier when the site is very big and contains loads of pages.
8) Avoid Flash
Avoid flash as much as possible. It might be cool and with all those cool animations and stuff but in reality its very slow, irritating some times and need plugins not like HTML which nearly anything can read. even SEO wise, Flash sites are not readable by crawlers for search engines.
9) HTML coding.....
Try to use HTML to design your site. You can come up with great stuff with just HTML, CSS and tables. The use of simple and standard fonts is highly recommended and this way you can try to minimise images.
10) Always over time check your load time
Over time, always see how long your site takes to load...always ask how its possible to shorten that time...Waiting makes people frustrated which will make them not visit your site and yet some might be potential visitors. There are many sites that offers they analysis to help you improve your site...
Always remember and think that most people has the slowest dial up connection and ask, How long will it take using the slowest connection? :)
