sorry to interject with a non-design post but as you can tell, the last few days of d*s have been plagued with slow (or non) loading times and server down time. it looks like we need to work with someone who does site optimization and knows a thing or two about servers so i thought i’d see if anyone out there specialized in this area or knew someone who did? i feel so terrible when things are difficult to load and i want to fix the problem as soon as possible. so if anyone knows of someone please feel free to drop a line right here. thanks so much! xo, grace.
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Hey Grace, what a pain in the A!! My son’s father does this sort of stuff. He owns Servelink, http://www.servelink.com/
And, ps my silhouttes are moving along!! will get back to you when my web site is finally ready too!! ; )
Hi, I see your site is based on wordpress, are you using the wp-cache plugin?
http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/posts/2007/01/31/963/
If not, you’ll find the load of your servers is dramatically decreased because rather than generating the page for each visitor that comes to the site, wp-cache will generate a cached version of your pages that is used instead of your database constantly being pounded by your visitors.
Hope that helps,
Mark.
Sorry, I mean if you are not currently using it, you will see a dramatic increase in speed, if you do.
Well, WordPress is not the best written software, in fact, it had a hard time getting into Debian at all, which is something like the standard of QA for these kind of things. So what you need is probably a GOOD PHP coder (1‰ of the PHP coders do actually know what they are doing) to optimize this site. Probably by using one or more of three technologies: http proxy (ie. Squid), local in-memory cache (ie. APC-based cache) or some intranet distributed in-memory cache like mcached. The best solution for you is probably the local in-memory based cache, as I suppose you do not have your own server and thus restricted access to the system. I’ve done several ops like this for large sites. Good luck!
I’ve found the site dramatically slower since the new design. It’s gorgeous, but SLO-O-O-W. It seems to partly be all the background images you’ve got – the canvas alone is 25k, and with some of the others it’s up over 50k – and that’s before the massive amounts of ads.
I hope the wordpress-cache thing works out!
Ok, I know little about site optimization, but my friend Mira Coone works with a company that does. It’s a national company, I believe. She can explain their services. Call her at: 314-406-3584.
Hi Grace, I had my fiance (who’s handy when it comes to web development/optimization) to look into your problem… He mentioned that the site has a LOT of heavy graphics and then the Flash ads on top of that. The full page download is a rather large 2.2 megabyte download… He says you could either downsize the graphics a bit, or put in a server cache-control directive to allow greater browser caching of all graphics. I don’t have a clue what that means, but I hope it helps! Love your site!
thanks guys!
im going to start talking to people and figure out what we can do to fix this. all of my ads are hosted off of d*s so i’m trying to keep as many big files off the server as possible but it doesn’t always seem to work.
but i’m on it, promise ;)
grace
*ps: and i found out we do use the cache ;)
Grace:
My company specializes in site optimization, and server support services. Feel free to contact me to discuss our services further!
Oh I thought I was the only one that was getting frustrated with how slow d*s loads. I’m glad that you’re taking measures to fix the problem.
Hey,
I’m redesigning my site (LOVE yours BTW) and just bought server space on Positive Fusion. Just goggle it. It’s super cheap. I bought my domain name at Godaddy.com.
I have access to inside info, so I know this is good advice. I haven’t launched my new look yet, but I’m told I can take everything from my current blog, and use WordPress as a customized template. I hope it will be up by the end of the month. It all depends on how quickly I can get my half done.
Good luck! I hope this helps.
If you need some Media Temple hosting (free for ds, of course), then just shout.
I work with a great programmer on my web site design projects. His name is Richard Zinn with Ballard Zinn Engineering. Their website is http://www.ballardzinn.com/.
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