I'm trying to improve loading speed for my website. I want to make the header and right and left columns be contained in a separate page so that they do not have to be downloaded every time a user. Is that hard to do? Because I can't find a good tutorial anywhere. P.S. Only web related languages I know are html, javascript, some cgi/perl, and css.
you have lot of options to have this done. - use iframes for header...etc - use frames. loading time will be least with this in my opinion. Search on internet for these you will get plenty of reference.
First take a look at what is causing your page to be slow. Table layouts, images, Flash media and inline and embedded scripts and stylesheets all add to the download overhead. Using frames, et al, has little true advantage. Images, scripts (you are putting them in external files, right?) and stylesheets are al cached. The browser doesn't reload them. The only reloaded items are plain text, and text just doesn't add up to much by its lonesome. The table markup, and the styles and scripts that aren't in their own files represent a redundant load. But those are your own fault, due to using poor coding practices. Frames in any variation have entirely too many negatives to use in any commercial site. cheers, gary
I have no desire to use frames. I don't like framey sites. But one reason it takes my page so long to load is that I have to paste the header, right column, and left column into each and every single page, making it have to be reloaded every time. What I want to do is have them downloaded only once somehow. I was going to do javascript, but I can't document.write('<script type="text/javascript">') inside of javascript, making it impossible to use javascript to load ads. Since the ads seem to be the only problem (as of now), I can do everything except the ads in javascript. But this seems to only be a short and slow workaround. I'm looking for solutions using cgi/perl, or even any other language as long as I can cut and paste into it.
I've been googling variants of "php include" and cache/caching in order to find a way to get a php include downloaded once and never having to do it again. It's hard because, apparently, there's a much more common phrase called php caching, which is not the same as the caching of a webpage that occurs when you visit it. Do you know how to get a visitor's computer to REALLY cache a php include?