Usability-Image Location

[CharlieWon]

I am new to website building and what the best practices are.

Where is the best place to call images from? When viewing the site while testing it starts to go very slow and times out. This is what my boss is saying "But one issue I noticed is that most of the graphic links and page links are external links --- it means they are not local links within the server's web directory. Therefore, this web site cannot be run locally. I am not 100% sure. But I guess that such external links will take more bandwidth that simply local directory links."

hmm...I don't understand what that means.

I need some advice from others as to how I can create better usability and where images and pages should be stored. Currently I have the index page in the main folder through ftp. The images are stored in a folder called "images". For example, here is where an image location looks like http://www.mysite.com/images/nav2_sansa.gif.

What does it mean to host a site locally? How should I be editing a webpage so that I don't slow the server down?

Thanks a ton for taking the time to help!!

[uppidy]

Local images
<img src="/images/someimage.jpg">

Not local images
<img src="http://www.someotherdomain.com/images/someimage.jpg">

If you are using the second option then he is correct. It will cause a huge slowdown if the other sites are slow. You should always host images displayed on your site yourself. There are instances where that isn't possible and you'll have to live with the slow downs or put them in an iframe. That way the page loads and the slow images can load on their own time.

If you are indeed hosting all of your images then you most likely have some server configuration issues going on. I highly suspect, based on his statement, that you are linking images from other sites and that is causing the slow downs. Hope this helps.