[LOCKED] How can I get my newly uploaded files to load quicker?

[Tony Whitehall]

How can I get my newly uploaded files to load quicker and more reliably?  

Often they take days to appear on the Net, and I keep on having to clear my browser history and caches, recreate the Dreamweaversite cache, synchronize my site files in Dreamwaverand re-uploading individual files in Dreamweaver and restarting my Macintosh computer to try to upload my files quicker.  It's frustrating.

I called my ISP.  I asked the technician there is I should get a VP server service from my ISP instead of renting 'shared hosting', but instead he He told me that my updated files are visible to others, but not to me, because of my use of framesets.  He opined that my site structure (using framesets and HTML 4 – are obsolete – and that I should redo the site from scratch in another program such as Wordpress.  

Redoing my Web site would be an enormous job which could take me three or four months of more, because I have such a huge site – with about 1,100 pages and 2,200 images and scores of Library items – which is the biggest Web site of any fine artist I've seen – and may be one of the biggest artist's Web site on the world.  

And hiring another Webmaster to recreate or update the site would unaffordable for me, so I want to be able to update my site myself.

Is there a feasible way to update my site efficiency by using Dreamweaver so I don't have to start from scratch using a totally different program such as Wix or Rapid Weaver?  (I didn't find any Net sites that advise using Wordpress for making Net sites so I've eliminated that idea.)

Someone else suggested I lease a new uploading FTP service like Host Gator or Blue Hosting while continuing to use Dreamweaver.

I want to maintain the basic look that my site has.

My Web site address is

tonymax.net

Thanks.

Tony

[B i r n o u]

hello

@BenPleysier , either if I agree with you on mobile orientation... I'm still working on desktop 😉 ... and I'm surprise of all this room lost and unused... (for info it's rendering is 100% on FF)

@Tony Whitehall why do you want to limit the width of the text and the size of your font

[Tony Whitehall]

Regarding the text size, having bigger text means that users have to scroll more to read the text.  The bigger the text is, the more users have to scroll.  Isn't this self-explanatory?  I thought everyone here is a professional Web developer.  If you can't read the text, you can zoom in or increase the page size.  Also, I've had my Web site for a quarter of a century – since 1996 – and you're the first person to complain that the text size is too small.  If I get the same complaint from others, I'll consider increasing the text size, but one complaint is 25 years is insufficient reason to increase the size.  

Also on this topic, I've designed the site so that the body copy is the same size.  This sonsistency is also consistent with professional design standards.

Regarding the wasted space:  Obviously  you don't have a backgroud in graphic design, Birnou.  I do.  I'm a former professional graphic designer.  Having graphics displays that have lots of empty space (called "white space" by graphic designers) is a commonly used design element among professional graphic designers and is taught in all good graphic design schools, books and workshops.

Have you never noticed billboards that have only one sentence, or a few words, or one word on them, surrounded by empty space?

Another reason for the so-called 'wasted space' is for legibitily.  One of the primary rules of graphic design incorporating text is not to have long line lengths of text, for legibility.  It's hard for readers to read long lines of text.  

I urge you to get a background in graphic design before criticising mine.  You're obviously an amateur designer.  I still remember when I was in graphic design school, we were advised by our instructor that it's a common misconception of amateurs to think that every square inch of page space must be used.  

And being a Web site developer is not the same as being a Webmaster; being a Webmaster means you're skilled and trained as a graphic designer.

So this is another false criticism of my Web site design, and it, too, shows that you are not the perfect team of experienced Web site analysts that Nancy claimed that you are.  

Tony

[Tony Whitehall]

[IRRELEVANT PERSONAL REMARKS REMOVED OVER ACP'S FORUM SIGNATURE.]

And I know that cell phones are more prevalent than desktop computers. That's not the issue.  The main issue is:  What's wrong with my site?  Where is the 'wasted space' that someone criticised my site for?  

And someone else just wrote that my site is 'a disaster crying out for change' or something like that?  Why?  That writer didn't expain why he thinks that?  

If you're a qualified, experienced focus group, as nasty Nancy wrote, why can't you explain in plain English what your rationales are instead of just attacking me?

Tony

[Nancy OShea]

Definition of Focus Group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_group

Definition of Mobile Friendly

https://marketfinder.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en_us/guide/make-your-website-mobile-friendly/

Google Mobile-Friendly (failed test)

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Why No Padlock (failed test)

https://www.whynopadlock.com/results/11c44b23-4c3e-4087-9d6f-ba51c222add5

WAVE Accessibility (failed test)

https://wave.webaim.org/report#/http://www.tonymax.net

Google Page Speed Insights (failed test)

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tonymax.net%2F

GTMetrix Performance (failed test)

https://gtmetrix.com/?job_error=093eM6Be

[Tony Whitehall]

I'm seeking evidence of my Web site being inferior – not affirmation of my Web site's sufficiency.

So far I've only received a criticism that my site has wasted space, with no screenshot being published here to demonstrate that vague criticism.  Show me the evidence!

You're being narrow-minded and hypocritical and insulting.

And Ben insulted me twice by claiming that I'm a narcissist, again not showing edvidence of that personal insult (which is against the ettituquette rule, by the way).

You, Nancy, and another critic here, wrote that you think my site hasn't generated much revenue because it doesn't have full-fledge e-commerce set up.  That shows that you have bad judgment and are presumptuous, in what you just called "an unbiased focus grouup". My site has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales for me. 

Just because you have experience and credentials doesn't mean your advice and assessments are always right.  As I just pointed out, your assessment of my site's revenue is dramatically wrong because you're presumptuous!

You're also presumptuous to claim that I just came here for affirmation of my site's quality.  What evidence to you have?  I didn't claim that my site is perfect.  I came here to ask for help because I acknowledge it's not perfect. So what if you showed a screenshot that shows an imperfect Web site rating.  What's more important is that the site has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales for me – contrarry to your presumptuous assumption of low sales due to the lack of full e-commerce facilites.

Like in other discussion groups, I'm finding increasingly here, too, that you're negative and have fragile egos; you're looking for "yes" people; you just want people to agree with you about everything, instead of questioning your assertions.  So again, I ask:  Where is the wasted space on my site that one critic criticized my site for?  Aside from the screenshot that shows that the site is imperfect, I don't see what specifically your criticisms address?  

And why did Ben twice insult me by labelling with a mental disorder (narcissistic personality disorder) without explaining the rationale for that off-topic insult?

Also, as is always the case when I ask for advice, your advice is inconsistent; one writer wrote that I can overhaul the site using Dreamweaver, and others recommended Wordpress or Wix for a complete overhaul.  How can I know what approach to take, given the fact that your advice is inconsistent?  As in other discussion groups, I find that you're short-tempered, narrow-minded, presumptuous and looking for a "yes man" and are willing to write me off when you haven't even explained why you say the site is so bad.  

And to back that up, I called my ISP a few days ago to ask why my site is so slow to show updated pages that I publish, and he said he doesn't see any issues with my site, so that contradicts your criticisms of my site.  

Tony

[Ben M]

This was no fault of Adobe, Dreamweaver is simply an editor like so many others. It's like blaming Microsoft for viruses when they can be attributed to any operating system, and the web has also evolved over time from what we have learned, so it's the same reasoning as to why homes are no longer have asbestos in their construction.

As you mention, your site has a lot of content, so the larger question is in your redesign is what is working from your current design and what are users looking for. Once you understand that, you work with a CMS/template that meets your needs and develop the site. It doesn't have to be complicated, but it should be strategic.

[Tony Whitehall]

Thanks, Ben.

What is working in my current design is the design.  Most users can easily find what they're looking for.

So I don't understand how redoing the site entirely using templates such as Wordpress or Wix would improve the site.

Also, I want to keep my current design, but I haven't seen any templates in Wordpress, Wix or any other Web site-building program that is similar to my current design.  

Tony

[osgood_]

Hi Tony,

Lets put this bluntly.

Your site is a relic of a bygone age. Being a relic of a byegone age it acts and performs like it was built in a byegone age. Think of a young person, slowly they get older - they can't do what they used to do when they were younger. Efficiency and performance fail to keep up as the body breaks down, your website is 'broken' in terms of todays technology and modern workflows being used.

How do you get it up to speed......work with the new technologies and technicques OR remain as you are and age not so gracefully.

Hope that kind of makes things clearer.

[Tony Whitehall]

I called my ISP a few days ago and the technician there tested my site twice by making two test pages and uploading them to the server.  He emailed me in conclusion that those new test pages loaded quickly onto the server.  

He blamed my cache, cookies and/or history being to blame for slow loading of my newly edited pages that I try to upload, but that can't be the reason, because no matter how much I clear my cache, cookies and history just before uploading, the new page edits are still usually too slow to appear in the browers both on my Imac and on my Iphone.

Tony

[Ben M]

---

@Tony Whitehall wrote:

Thanks, Ben.

What is working in my current design is the design.  Most users can easily find what they're looking for.

So I don't understand how redoing the site entirely using templates such as Wordpress or Wix would improve the site.

Also, I want to keep my current design, but I haven't seen any templates in Wordpress, Wix or any other Web site-building program that is similar to my current design.  

Tony

---

This is an assumption not a fact because you have said in your earlier post:

"I'm no longer using Google Analytics, because Google included my own hits on my Web site, and it was too much time and effort to exclude my own hits from the statistics, because my IP address kept on changing periodically without me being notified."

So if you don't have data, how do you know your design works as a fact?  While your own visits are being recorded, you can still filter things and look at visits outside of your home region/city and view the data and journeys that your customers take. Have you asked or looked to figure out whether the navigation is working, or whether users are going to search because they cannot find what they need. And looking further how many users are leaving your site without finding what they need. Are they getting stuck at a particular point?

And to your point: "When running a small business, missing opportunities is a necessity", I cannot agree with that statement. While there are points with a small business where the risk outweighs the reward and there are opportunities that it is best to walk away from, having the mindset that missing opportunities being a necessity can prevent a business from growing. Taking on debt smartly to do everything from hiring additional help, to buying newer/better painting supplies/materials, or getting a newer website can pay off in the long run and turn what would have been a missed opportunity into growth potential.

Like your business, a website is to be seen as an investment over time and you will only be able to get out of it what you put into it. You cannot expect a website from today to look exactly like your website was anymore than you would expect a newer model of your car to look exactly the same as an older model does. But the newer model can help both yourself and your customers with newer features or conveniences that old model wasn't able to offer. 

[Tony Whitehall]

Thanks, Ben.

I don't know how to check for how many users are leaving the site without finding what they looked for.  I gave up trying to figure out things like that in Google Analytics because it's too technical for me to be able to figure out without spending too much time on such technical issues to make my time use efficient.

You wrote, "So if you don't have data, how do you know your design works as a fact?"  As I explained previously, I get direct feedback from my customers who email me and visit my studio gallery and buy my products and praise my Web site.  I get direct feedback from my customers who, when I ask them, often tell me that they searched for a particular kind of art on the Intenet and that's what led them to my site.  That's because of the considerable amount of promotion I've done over the years.  And I get feedback from the dozens of unsolicited compliments about my site's quality – its organization and ease of finding what the users are looking for.  The proportion of compliments far exceeds the proportion of critisisms.  One exception, as I explained before, too, is the increasing number of choices of products, but there's no practical solution to that problem. 

You wrote, "And to your point: 'When running a small business, missing opportunities is a necessity', I cannot agree with that statement.  No; you're wrong.  I'm already considerably in debt and my sales are down significantly because of the virus and other factors. I can't afford to hire staff and there's a limit to how much money I can borrow to stay afloat.

You don't understand the profound negative effects of the virus.  For the first in decades in the U. S., the life expectancy has decreased because about 660,000 Americans have died prematurely and shoppers' buying has been suppressed.  In Canada, it's expected that 225,000 small business will not survive the pandemic crisis and many of those businesses have already closed permanently.  

You wrote, "a website is to be seen as an investment over time and you will only be able to get out of it what you put into it."  I'm well aware of that and you missed my point.  Upgrading my Web site is only one opportunity out of thousands of opportunities that are available to me (and other small businesses) at any given time.  It's IMPOSSIBLE  for me therefore to take advantage of even a small fraction of those opportunities because I'm not a super hero; I can't be in more than one place at a time, and you missed my point also that every opportunity (or seeming opportunity) comes with a cost.  For example, I have art dealers and galleries who sell my art, but most of them charge a 50 percent commission, which seriously reduces my net income, and the more middlemen like that that I have promoting my work, the more time I need to dedicate to managing those sellers, which means I have less time for social media promotion, less time to experiment with new art subject matter, less time to upgrade my Web site, less time to work on advertising that's not related to my Web site, less time to paint, etcetera.  

I'm human, and therefore I need to take care of my health, so I'm not willing to risk overworking to the point of getting a heart attack or stroke from overwork, which is what you and some of my slave-driver middlemen sellers have pushed me to do.  If I die of a heart attack or stroke, my art and my Web site will be useless.  It's imprtant to keep such things in perspective.  I want to stay alive and be healthy, so devoting every waking moment to my career, as you've implied I should, would be unsustainable and foolish.

I'm one of Canada's top fine artists, with decades of experience, with collectors of my art in 29 countries, I have 49 corporate and institutional collectors, I've been the top-selling artist in several art galleries, I've had 157 art galleries and dealers selling my art, and I have probably one the biggest individual artist Web sites on the world (with 1,300 print editions available)  and at least tens of thousands of fans, and my art has been seen by millions of people.  

You've never sold any art or been an artist.  You don't know anything about the art industry or what it takes to run an art business, so you're not qualified me to advise me on how to succeed as an artist.  Your statement that I can take advantage of every opportunity to make and promote art that there is clearly absurd because it's impossible, and it shows that you don't know anything about what it means to be an artist and a small businessman, and this again shows that not all of the advice I receive in this group can be trusted.

Tony

[B i r n o u]

Redoing my Web site would be an enormous job which could take me three or four months of more, because I have such a huge site – with about 1,100 pages and 2,200 images and scores of Library items 

By @Tony Whitehall

in fact, I just went through your site, and there is not much in it... just a lot of images... but few categories, and even less subcategories... a few satelite pages of ornament... so in fact, it all depends on the workflow you are going to use... it's true that if you work in a unitary way, that is to say one image at a time, one page after the other... maybe 4 months will not be enough.

but if you use flow techniques, and automated batch processing, based on the large NPM availability to avoid to reinvent hot water at every line... a set of scripts can be used, and can on one hand browse a tree listing all the elements browsed on these folders, (defining categories), another can be based on the EXIF data of each image, coupled to a reference file that can assign a categorization. ... the derived images can be rebilled on the fly, to avoid any naming concerns ... in short ... all this can be done very well under Node. We can estimate a week of work (not much) depending on the complexity...

then this result is either directly sent to a database, or to an Excel file (which is the same by the way.... after that it's just a question of working habits)

once the Wordpress template is set up (1 or 2 days with the cannibalization of a premium template already close to expectations), finally the development of a specific plug in to work on the data entered previously will allow to manage the display and the structuring (count 4 days)

to this we add one week, just to remove some hares...

[B i r n o u]

well, just for infos, I already have done such project in less than ten days.

[osgood_]

all this can be done very well under Node. We can estimate a week of work (not much) depending on the complexity...

By @B i r n o u

You think the OP knows what Node is and how to use it? This thread is almost as hilarious, in places, as the video I posted a couple of days ago........crazy sh*te.

[B i r n o u]

youps... that's not the point I was trying to spot 😜 ... in fact it was to continue the metaphor used by Ben about his gardener's job...