Need to speed up site for slow connections

[breweruk]

Hi,

I have built a site to help independent media in transition and post-conflict countries and areas where freedom of expression is under threat.

The idea is to provide a network of support for media organisations trying to improve their editorial products and reach financial sustainability.

It reflects the work I have been doing for the past six years.

However, I have a problem.

I use the ELEMENT template I bought from one of the Joomla template pages and it is very slow.

Many of my users will be on slow, dial-up connections and I am concerned that those people the site is designed to help won't be able to see it.

I don't have the experience to optimise the template and have tried to get tips from this forum in the past, but have not been able to fix it.

Is there a template that would be better for my purposes, light, fast to download but also offering me all the functionality of ELEMENT?

Any suggestions welcome.

David

http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org/

[samp]

I don't think the template is the major problem. Maybe you can have a non-graphics version of you site only with the news, using the feeds, that people can access using slow conections.

[breweruk]

Hi Samp,

What a good idea. Thanks for that. Is there a mod for building a non-graphics version?

David

[Asphyx]

No there is no mod...
What you can do is attempt to compress the reduce the bandwidth requirements of the graphics being used.

This means getting rid of all references to gifs and using jpg or png instead.
you could however make a completely seperate template that does not use images as was suggested...

You could then use a module called template chooser that users could select between which template works best for them but for that to work properly you would have to make the graphicless site the default and then have users with better bandwidth select the graphic version...

There may be an extention that lets users select what skin Joomla displays based on their account info and that might be something to look at.

[breweruk]

Great idea, thanks for your help and suggestions.

David

[Asphyx]

Definitly post back and let us know how you made out.
I can see a lot of uses for your final solution aside from just bandwidth reduction.

[breweruk]

Hi,

I ended up posting on the Joomlashack forum in the Element template section and two really helpful people, Dean and TJ, helped me optimise the template.

Before I started it was loading in 44 seconds at 56k --- far too slow for the many who might want to my site on dial up connetions.

After going through a number of optimisation tricks, suggested by Dean and TJ, I got it down to 6.5 seconds at 56k.

Amazing.

Here is the thread and how it was done, in case anyone is having similar problems.

http://www.joomlashack.com/component/op ... pic,2943.0

Regards

David
http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org

[igeoffi]

looks very useful
we could use a FAQ on this