Amature in need of some advice

[RadicalRoosterGC]

Hi guys,

Im pretty new both to web design and the forums.
So far i have only made a couple of very basic sites using dreamweaver (and i mean very basic - header, content, footer and a few links to the left)

I recently decided to try putting together a gaming community, we have a few game servers and 30 members so all is going well .. but we were missing a website.

I decided to try designing a site from scratch, rather than use one of those somewhat fixed templates that free clan site services privide.

I started by buying some web space and installing phpbb so members could communicate, i decided not to mess to much with the phpbb templates for now, as the amount of style sheets was a little daunting to say the least :icon_tongue_smilie:

So, more to the point, im trying to create a basic layout for the site, it could be going a lot worse but I have run into a few problems ..

Main problem being the way i have created the banner .. I must have done it the most inefficient way possible and loading time is an issue.

I made the banner in photoshop and included several link buttons, i then used the slice tool to slice out the links and areas where i wanted a reote rollover. The problem that I didnt account for is load time, im pretty sure the problem is the amount of http requests taking place when the page loads, as there are so many seperate images.

All of the images are saved in png24 format, i did try png8 and gif but file size wasnt a lot different.

Reading around i found posts about "image maps" but some people said this method wasnt the best way to tackle the issue.

If someone could take a look at what we have so far (most of the links dont link anywhere) and suggest a way to improve loading time (preferably without having to start again) it would be much appreciated.

Example page:
| RRGC | Gaming News | Home |

Cheers,
Tom

[chris_17]

I don't see why you would want to go with an image map. Save what you can as JPEG and 'save for web and devices'.

Also you need to sort your code out, personally I'd start over it. Don't use tables.

Have a look on W3C Schools website for coding side of things.

[I4Visual]

I don't see why you would want to go with an image map. Save what you can as JPEG and 'save for web and devices'.

Also you need to sort your code out, personally I'd start over it. Don't use tables.

Have a look on W3C Schools website for coding side of things.

I totally agree with chris. The design needs fixing, also, I can see it's a gaming site of course but I feel from a professional point of view the vibrant colours and logo really aren't something I could find myself looking at for very long, it feels like a bit too much, like the page is attacking you almost.

That's as much as I can say really, the design isn't bad at all, it's jus tthe colours that are asking too much of it.

[djb]

Just had a really quick look and you could make your life a lot easier (and decrease some file sizes) by just having the tabs of the banner change colour rather than the whole border.

[Corrosive]

Agree with the others. Your site is slow due to your coding method. Tables and export from Photoshop aren't good ideas. You need to look at it again and do some reading on CSS based sites.

[nickio15]

ye drop the javascript and focus more on the css way of coding navigation etc. This will speed things up a lot!