Thread: Seriously fast - I hope!!

Shebeeners -I've listened hard and thought long and have restructed the site once again to make pages load as fast as possible. A couple of you have complained about the long time it takes pages to load, and how frustrating this was. I appreciate your candid feedback and hope you will notice the difference, and will refrain from making too many big changes in the future.

Where it took over 56 seconds to load the old home page on a dial-up connection on the first visit to our Shebeen, it now takes a mere 20 seconds. Other pages will load even faster because a couple of scripts are only downloaded once and then cached on your computers. I've also implemented a new caching system to improve overall site performance.

Since many of you are still on dialup accounts - especially in rural areas - we hope this will improve your overall experience and usability of the site

In the process of improving page loading times we've had to take some hard decisions, and as a result have stripped away some of the boxes and teasers on the home page that you may have become used to, but which on closer inspection offered little value, but took up valuable space on the page.

Below are some more speed test results:

Page size (total): 160.414 Bytes
Number of elements considered: 14
Expected loading time for Modem / ISDN (56-64 kbs):21,39 s
Expected loading time for DSL1000 (1024 kbs):1,25 s
Expected loading time for DSL2000 (2048 kbs):0,63 s
Expected loading time for DSL3000 (3064 kbs):0,42 s
Expected loading time for DSL6000 (6128 kbs):0,21 s

As ever, thank you very much for all your feedback and input!