Store redesign is slow to load

I just had my online store redesigned by an experienced Yahoo Store designer and the page load time is much longer than my previous home-made design. The new design has more graphics than the old one but it also a ghastly amount of nested HTML tables.

You can actually watch the page render - even with broadband. The old design would pretty much just snap into view.

Is there a time penalty when many nested HTML tables are involved? My front page is graphical but it's not crazy. And actually, the main Devshed forums page took longer to load (but that could be a totally different issue).

The store is located at www.hippychixshop.com . Even with broadband you can watch it being drawn. Don't mean to put a plug here but probably not many of you are into women's clothing - though we have had orders from cross-dressers.

Any thoughts on the load time? I'm thinking of crunching the jpegs a bit more but that'll only have limited effect.

Nested tables aren't necessarily the issue.

The page loads like this because none of the images have width or height specified in the <img> tags.

The browser knows that there are images coming, but can't predict the space it needs to allocate for each image. So, the HTML tables are drawn out first, then the images are imported.

Importing images w/o knowing the size of each image causes the table to be redrawn as each image is loaded; hence the bumpy loading.

Specifying the width & height for each image will go a long way to fixing this problem.

Also, I would seriously reconsider using the developer you've got - any web applications developer worth their salt knows the basics like specifying image dimensions.

Very interesting that you said that as that's exactly what was lurking in the back of my mind! I saw a few images without dimensions and thought, "wtf?".

Its an amaturish thing to do... and, I would be a dollar to a doughnut that the lack of image dimension specifications is what is causing your site to load oddly.

If I were in your position, I would go back to bat w/ the original developer and demand that the dimensions be put in for each image.

Another reason to reconsider your choice of developers: check out the site in Mozilla. If you're targetting non-IE users, you're site is going to need a little more work.

Can you recommend the browsers I should test the site in?
Is Netscape based on Mozilla? Or should I just get:

Netscape
Mozilla
Opera

Thanks!

I don't honestly think that this kind of site is targeting non-MSIE users; I think its targeting hippies who like cool stuff.

Really, though, w/ 95%+ marketshare, very few developers - even so called 'professional' ones - test sites outside of MSIE.

Personally, I don't browse with anything but Mozilla Firebird v0.6 - its the fastest, cleanest, most W3-compliant browser available. The web developers browser of choice[TM].

If you want to be thorough, test your site in MSIE (latest version); Mozilla 1.4; Mozilla Firebird 0.6; Opera (use the free version - theres no reason to pay for this just to test your site, and no reason to buy it when a better browser is free); and, finally, if you have access to a Mac running OSX, Safari (don't worry about Mac IE, its being phased out, and most Mac users have switched to Safari anyhow).

But, thats only if you want to be thorough. If you want a quick overview of how your site will perform in other browsers, just run it through one of the last Mozilla releases (1.4 or Firebird) - it will give you a fair sense of how your site looks in browsers other than MSIE.

If you want to punish yourself, you can test your site in Netscape 4.7. Keep in mind that N4.7 was outdated even when it was first released - v4.x is basically the reason that Netscape fell off of the face of the earth during the browser wars. Frankly, I've given up on testing in N4.x - if a user is still browsing w/ this dinosaur, that's their problem, not mine.

Thanks for the concise advise - both of you.

I guess I'll try Mozilla 1.4 and the latest free Opera. At first I was a little shocked/disappointed that the site wasn't rendering well in Mozilla (I can't tell - I'm taking your word on it) but the chances of anyone techie enough to use Mozilla and be a potential customer at my very "girlie" store are probably almost non-existent. Unless they're using some popular browser based on Mozilla (??).

But I would like the site to work in Opera. I've played with it and keep waffling about using the free version.

I'm guessing that there are alignment problems due to the large number of nested tables - though I currently don't have access to Mozilla. I'm thinking you've got to be dam sharp to get such a "complex" page to look good in IE as well as other browsers. I remember giving up on Netscape years ago as trying to get things to line up correctly in both was a hair-pulling experience - with NS always being the one causing the grief.

I may have to live with this - I doubt my developer is any more Mozilla-cognizant that I am.

And the clothes aren't for hippies. I currently can't explain how our name ended up that way!

Update: I downloaded the latest Opera and it renders the site exactly as it does in IE6 - even the little alignment issues that I don't like. That, at least, gave me a warm and fuzzy.

I finally got around to downloading Mozilla Firebird. My friend said it was...cool. As Bricker mentioned, he also saw an alignment problem with my site using Firebird.

After messing with the HTML a bit, I finally figured out the problem. Mozilla Firebird did not like the fact that I, or the designer I should say, put two images within one anchor. I simply took the second image out of the anchor and Firebird rendered it just fine. What it did was wrap the second image below the first when it really should have put it just to the right of the first image like IE and Opera did.

Way cool! Hopefully my store looks good on most all browsers now. And you're right on with your IE stats. I started using SiteMeter a little while ago and almost exactly 95% are using IE. A whopping 75% are using IE 6.