[Scummvm-devel] New website

[Max Horn]

Yo folks,

so the new website seems to work fine and all. Many thanks to Eugene  
and Yaroslav Fedevych for making this finally happen! It looks slick  
and works fine. I am very happy to see the new site and really really  
appreciate all the work that has gone into it. Congrats!


Now, there is one issue I have with the new site (and this is not  
meant to slight the work done here in any way). That is it's size.  
Loading the front page takes more than 270 kb. For me with DSL, this  
means a loading time of 1-2 secs. But for many people out there, it  
still means haveing to wait 17 secs if you have ISDN, or about   
minute (!) if you use a 56K modem. This isn't nice.

Even for those people with big pipes, it's preferable to have a  
smaller page size, I guess. Now, I realize that it might not be  
possible to improve this a lot given our website design... but at  
least we could try.

A nice starting place is this one: <http:// 
www.websiteoptimization.com/>. You can use it analyze the HTML, CSS  
and images of any site and it'll give you hints on how to improve.


The heroes?.png pictures alone already take 70-80kb. We should  
consider reducing their number . While they form a really cool  
addition to the site, each additional variant has to loaded by the  
browser, thus reducing the effectiveness of caching.

Alternatively, we should consider JPEG. And scummvm_logo.png is  
another whopping 50K. I tried using ImageMagick to quickly convert  
those images to JPEG, and the resulting pics had half the size with a  
quality that I found not to be lacking compared to the PNGs.


Finally, some interesting reads I found while searching for info on  
this: <http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites/>
<http://www.fiftyfoureleven.com/sandbox/weblog/2004/jun/doors-meet- 
sprites/>


Cheers,
Max