Trodden into the exciting arena of web designing… Before you go into intricate details, one important thing to keep in your mind is to minimize the loading time of your site. Your site may be very attractive and well arranged, but in this fast moving world, where everyone wants everything with a blink of an eye, nobody would care to wait for web pages, which take a long time to load. Also, search engine algorithms also do take into consideration your load time. Keep in your mind these useful points while designing your website so that you can output a fast loading website.

HTML

Nothing works better than HTML. So, as much as possible try to design your site-using HTML. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc. Also make sure that your site doesn't have any unwanted tags and that it is optimized.

Minimum use of images

Minimize the use of images to make your website a fast loading one. Images do add to the attraction of a page, but they add to the loading time too. A balance between simplicity and eye-catchers is a must. Try using background colors and fills instead of heavy images. Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580, which is a uniform design, you can use just a part of that as a background fill. Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor. You can also use text links using CSS style instead of image buttons.

Optimization of heavy files

Other important thing to remember is to optimize heavy graphics, Flash files and scripts. In editors like fireworks and flash you can see the various options in the preview panel to reduce the sizes. Images should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image.

Effective table designing

Tables load very fast because they are just HTML code. Design using nested tables instead of using cell merges and splits. Use separate tables wherever possible. Not designing for 100% height is better as if you use just one outer table; the web page is displayed only after the table is loaded fully. If many outer tables are present [you can have different tables for the header, content, footer, etc.] the page displays the content of each table as soon as its elements are loaded.

Server Side Include (SSI) files

SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster. So, try and use them wherever possible.

Check load time

Last but not least, keep checking the load time of your site through free site tools available on the net. (Ex: NetMechanic)