i just wanted to know some extra tricks and tips i can use to make my site work great, being fast, and work well on all browsers. i think this will also help a lot more people and not just me.
so lets start a list of things we can do to make our site work better, faster.
start your commenting.

This post has been edited by major: Apr 12 2006, 06:05 AM

Limit your images. Do not put heavy images on the web because it will be
difficult to load.
Errors
Limit the animations.

dont put to much flash on it or it will take forever to load and try setting background pictures in your tables or just use a photo shop template

Try not putting a lot of flash in it, and perhaps try using PNGs or lower resolution JPEGs so it slight speeds up the loading time. But it really depends on what type of users you are after, and considering some sites have to take into consideration the dial-up users.

NEVER use a large, centered image as a background! I always use smaller tiled images or just a background color set by HTML. Also dont use too many rollover images in things like buttons as they can take a lot of time to download both images on slower internet connections. Like the 'good' old days of 56kbps, it would drive me mad waiting for images to download!

If you are using HTML you can speed up your site with compression (basically removing whitespace). The easiest (and cheapest) way of doing this is using a freeware product such as Absolute HTML Compressor to optimize your pages. You can download it from HERE. When using JPEG's you can recompress them at a lower quality to reduce their size. Sometimes you can get down to 25% compression (or lower) on the image without any noticable difference from the original. Also, resize the images smaller. If you are using tiled images on the background and its a solid color, just use HTML instead of the image. I've actually seen tiled background images as small as 10x10 pixels. If using javascript isn't really necessary, then don't.

I think javascripts slow down your site. OR maybe it was my computer.lol. Like some of the scripts are big. FOr me i would just compress my images like jpeg or png. Or use different format like gifs are smaller in size but you conpromize quality i'm sure you know that stuff already. make sure everything loads fine and no broke images and what not.

Make sure you don’t have to many background codes or music, especially the music. Make sure you don’t have any javascript running in the background or those stupid cursor changers, no big images like they previously stated, remove website counters and useless things like that, get a better server…

Like many suggested, the main problem is due to picture sizes and the amount of flash animations. Another important factor that many missed out is the amount of scripts involved in the page. Avoid more than 3 scripts for that page or particular HTML file. Usually people loves the animations done by javascript not realising that those scripts takes up loading time. In addition, the script takes up processing time as well as they are needed to be rendered by the browser and display as programmed. It will further worsen the situation if the scripts are not properly programmed and contain bugs which results in memory overflow.

Avoid frames as possible as each frame is treated as another browser within your page. Each frame cost 1 http request to the server. For every http request to the web server, it slows down in overall loading your entire website. Similar does for iframes.

Also, avoid more than 1 external CSS file. As external CSS files must be in the head section of your HTML document, hence they must be loaded first before any body content displays. Although they are cached, CSS files slow down the initial display of your page.

You can always use this service to check if your website is optimised for speed surfing.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
The reults also gives recommendations to your page to improve loading time.

Thanks for the tip concerning the webpage analyzer at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/... I never knew it existed. I just checked my website and it flunked with running colors. It looks like I have some optimizations to perform on it.