In your opinion, what is the Max. time a webpage should take to load? My in-progress portfolio takes 2.4 seconds. Also, any thoughts on how to speed up the loading time?
well that issue is determined based on the person's internet connection as in if they are using dial up it would take 10-30seconds to load. Also if you got alot of traffic on the site it would be even slower so yeah those are some of the issues as far as speeding it I don't know.
2.4 sec speed on dsl is not bad actually. If your landing page is all html, it should be faster then that.
2.4 sec speed on dsl in excellent in my opinion,Max. time for loading a web page should not exceed 15 second ,I believe.
If you used less gradients, you could cut image sizes 70%, maybe more. Also, use a single external stylesheet.
max 15 seconds ?? I definitely won't wait 15 seconds until I can read something on a page ! Unless the content is there fast and only some small graphics need to be updated, or if it's a very long page and things under the fold have to wait.. I just checked out the site of the OP and that takes a long time to load. Over 2 seconds for some basic empty boxes ???? that's bad ! Reduce the image size (test with jpeg compression, PNG and GIF and see what gives the smalles file size), make background gradients 1 pixel wide and repeat them horizontal. Put in CSS first a background color and then image, so the viewer immediately gets the correct yellow color and then the gradient is put over it (so you don't immediately notice the slow loading). Take an example of the new layout I'm working on: http://www.paperarcade.com/tempsite/ If you really want a gradient behind the main text box, make it just 1 pixel wide, and put the rounded corners in seperate images that you put in other div's around it. (see the code roundedcornr.com generates) In the images of the menu (home / portfolie /..) you hae a black border. WTF ?? Black is already the background of your website ! There is NO use at all to make your images bigger by including thick black borders. Trim the images and use CSS padding/margin settings to position them so you still see a nice black border above and under it. To answer your original question: an empty basic layout like yours should load in less than 1 second.
2.4 is great, 10-15 is getting a little slow, 20 or more and you need to ask why is it loading so slow? is there image size issues? should you splice your images a little more? should you get a more responsive host?
I didn't have a problem with the load-time of your page. One suggestion would be to move the text away from the sides (leave a bit of a margin) and maybe change the font size some.