A couple of website questions

[Denise]

Disclaimer - I am not very computer literate, but I am learning - against my better judgement some days. I understand small words that are actually English much better than computereeze.

I am working on putting up some new sections on our website. I am trying to make it dial up friendly since that is not only what we have practical access to, but also what a lot of our customers use. These ones have lots of pictures. I can get them down to 900 Kb to 1.2 Mb in Word, but then when I print them to pdf files (I actually know what these are!! I feel smart!!), which I like to do so they can be printed out easily by our customers, they jump up in size by about ½ again. Why? Is there anything else I can do to keep the size down?

Second question. Our index page was nicely done up for us by a very helpful brother in law who taught himself HTML one morning just for us. I can get along with it simply by cutting and pasting and copying and changing what he originally did. I am now curious enough to want a counter on it which wasn't on the original page. Is there something, somewhere, I can cut and paste into my page (small because we are on dial up, remember?) that will give us a very basic counter to see how many times someone has opened up our main page?

Thank you for your help.

[Beaverslayer]

Hi Denise,

What I use on mine is Google, they have a free service that trcks not only the hits but also who, where, when and almost why. They also supply you with the code to cut and paste and tell you just where to paste it in your code.

https://www.google.com/analytics

It's a real neat addition that keeps track of everything, you might want to have a look.

Ken

[HorsehairBraider]

Who hosts your site? Depending on who it is they may have some tool available for you. Also I will sometimes see a page on the web that I really admire, and if you go up to the top right hand part of your screen (this is if you are running Internet Explorer) you will see the word "Page". Click on it and a little menu appears. One of the options on the menu is "View Source". Click on this, and you will get a little window showing the HTML code that makes up that page. I taught myself to do HTML and reading the way other people did it was one of the things that helped me... Anyway, if you find a webpage with a counter that you like, you might try reading the code, and then seeing if you can do something like that. Or your BIL. Whoever.

I'm not sure about the pdf files. All I can suggest is that the program makes changes in your files. Some programs will do this. Is there some way you can just use HTML? That might give you a little more control.

[Johanna]

Statcounter.com has a nifty little html code you can embed in a site, if your host has no tools available. I'm not sure why your pdfs are growing bigger, unless they are saving all the images more than once? If you insert an image into a Word doc, then drag its sides to change size, all the generated images end up in the corresponding folder. Could the pdf be retaining even the unused images? If you want to email me an example, I'll take a look and let you know what I think is happening. Try changing the size of your images in another program (Paint, Irfanview etc) and then dropping it in Word (don't let Word do the resizing) and see if the pdf problem persists.

Johanna

[Denise]

Our site is one that comes along with our basic internet package. A real low cost affair, but it seems to do the job at this stage anyway.

Thanks for the help, everyone.

[daviD A Morris]

[...they jump up in size by about ½ again. Why? Is there anything else I can do to keep the size down?

I have noticed this in MSword. If I insert a 100kb image (of any type, jpg, gif, etc) into a word document, it actualy adds 200kb to the size of the word document. I'm interested to hear why this would be and if there is any alternative.

thanks

dam

[Sidney Wood]

Denise;

I regularly use one of the printer driver converters to make PDF's It used to just about halve the size of a Word doc. when I was still using it.

The best format for any web page is semantic HTML and CSS for layout and styling (in regard to file size) You can even use the CSS styling to strip the chrome from a page to make it printer friendly. (Don't use my site as an example, I haven't gotten around to it yet) In fact I use a text editor ans a small CSS file for a word processer and print from the browser.

What is your URL, I would like to see what your doing, maybe could send you some stuff you could use by email.

Sidney Wood