Advanced Performance Techniques

You thought Vanilla Ice was a bad Wrapper?

Placing your content in frames can seem like an excellent method for speeding up a site – after all, the menu need only be downloaded once, etc.  However, the advantages are outweighed by the difficulty in achieving cross-platform/browser compatibility, and the relatively slow speed at which browsers render framed content.  Together with the multiple search engine problems they introduce, they should generally be avoided.

Wrapping all of your HTML inside a single table can also seem like a good idea – you can limit the width of your site, or scale it all by changing the percentage width of the outer table.  However, most browsers do not render the contents of a table until the HTML for the entire table has been loaded – therefore, a 50 k page will display a blank page until it has all been loaded.  This can APPEAR to be a very slow page, although it is just as fast as any other 50k page.  The user will get confused and agitated by the lack of any content appearing, and will try elsewhere.  Alternatively, try placing content in a few separate tables, or better still, use CSS for positioning of content.  This may add a few more bytes to your code, but the IMPRESSION of speed will be greater – the user can read the top of the page while the remainder downloads.