2 things - new window and menu bar

hi,

i made this website for my husband. it sucks, but he still refers his clients there and counts on it. here are my problems.

1. the menu bar seems to take forever to load. and, it is the last thing to load. do you know how i can either get the menu bar to load at the same time as everything else, or, get the menu bar to load first?

2. on some of the links, i have a new window open to a certain size. it looks perfect on my computer, but people have complained that the window is not big enough to reveal all of the data.

3. oops, guess i have 3 questions. when those new windows open, they seem to be trapped within the main page. i definitely want it to pop open in the same page, but how do i get the new window to scroll if need be (nobody says need be anymore, but it just came out).

well, there are my stupid questions. i sure hope someone takes pity on me and helps me out because, like zack, "i got nowhere else to go..."

thanks.
website is http://www.rmtillman.com

Chunky

1. IMHO, one problem is lots and lots of (buggy?) javascript. Lately I browse with Mozilla or Firebird. The menu bar never did show up for me, although it slowed my PC down enough I thought I'd have to do another of my several daily reboots.

I am not a javascripter, but, the navcond.js, which is apparently read in, is about 24KB of text by itself. Then there's another ~couple KB in the page itself. Then it has to run all that programming. I don't know how it all works, and suspect it doesn't work very well.

FWIW, My javascript console shows a couple errors, like:

Error: Layer is not defined
Source File: http://www.rmtillman.com/navcond.js
Line: 8
+++++++ and

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.getIntPref]" nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://cookie/content/cookieTasksOverlay.xul :: CookieTasksStartup :: line 84" data: no]

The windows pop up without any controls. You need to edit your js to set scrollbars=yes and resizable=yes. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of online js popup generators that will let you specify controls, size, etc. and then generate the corresponding code. Here's one randomly plucked from the ether:

http://javascript.internet.com/generators/popup-window.html

Here's a discussion that explains some of the available options:

http://www.katsueydesignworks.com/cgi_basic_popup.htm

Hope this helps a little.

Chunky-

The first thing I can recommend is to optimize your graphics. Here's a few numbers: Your home page is 179k in size, which takes roughly 26 seconds to load on a 56k dial-up. Your "Benefits" page is 279k in size, which takes roughly 40 seconds to load. The bad news is that you're probably losing a lot of potential customers who get antsy waiting; the good news is that those who are willing to sit through it really want what you have to offer.

I ran a couple of your graphics through Fireworks (there are a lot of programs out there you can use, including freeware) and there were some startling results from optimizing: your header graphic shrank from 71k to 20k; the other collage on your home page shrank from 65k to 21k; and your signature graphic shrank from an 11k jpg to a 2.5k gif. On your homepage that would eliminate 71k and reduce your load time by 10 seconds. You can run the math and see how much quicker that would make your whole site.

As for your javascript menu, you might want to reconsider it all together. A menu like that is good when you have a lot of sub-pages, but most of your links only have single catagories. A very workable alternative might be to have a static navigation bar that leads to pages with additional information and options.

You might want to map out on paper how you want your site layout to look. On your navigation, your "Purchase" and "Calculators" links are identical with the exception of the dictionary in Calculators. You could save space and loading time if you consolidated.

There are two final things that I think are important to mention:

First: I, and a lot of the world have our monitors set to an 800x600 resolution. After you remove the pixels for the scrollbar and other browser chrome, there is about 760 pixels of viewable space. There are some people in the world who have rez set even lower. Your header graphic (and your nav menu) is 820 pixels wide, which makes seeing the whole page at once out of the reach of the majority of your potential end-users.

Finally: You might be on some thin legal ice by hotlinking to all the worksheets from calculator.com (all your pop-ups). I know as a webmaster, I would be upset to find that someone is using MY intellectual propety and bandwidth (even though DH gives me so much for little $) without duly compensating me. This may not be your case, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

The best place I found for putting some of these concepts (like optimization and site layout) in easily digestible nuggets is http://www.htmlgoodies.com.

That being said, I wish you luck!

thank you everyone for your replies. i am going to digest all of your input and fix this stuff. i guess i really did have some place to go.

chunky

Chunky