My first website build in rapid weaver is now online!

My first website build in rapidweaver is now online.

The software I used;
RapidWeaver 8
Foundation
Total CMS
Gallery 3
Impact
Elevator
Share it
Page loader

I have no experience or what so ever building websites. I have build in Adobe Muse a website and I wanted to continue with Muse, bud Adobe is terminating Muse in about a few years. I switched to Rapidweaver and I have to say, i am so happy with Rapidweaver it’s simple and easy to learn and it’s doing want you want it to do. I followed several courses (tutorials) to learn how it works and finally I followed the course foundation and after that Total-CMS. This course I used as a basis to build my website With old pictures of my hometown Voorthuizen, Netherlands. Please visit the site, it is all in Dutch.

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@Ronald great job, nice website.
Mooi om de geschiedenis van Voorthuizen te lezen.

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Ja inderdaad leuke interessante site, vooral als een eerste site. Interessante inhoud :smile:

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Nice job… and nice planning too! So many people just jump in without knowing even the basic concepts of RW then they get frustrated. Thumbs-up.

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Planning was not an issue, I had more problems with designing, the looks, that cost me a lot of time and I am still not happy with it. Now I am looking around on other websites to do some inspiration.
Rapid Weaver is easier to handle than Adobe Muse. when I compare the software, you don’t have the huge amount of fonts in RapidWeaver. In Muse and or indesign you have access to typekit.

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If you want more access to fonts in RapidWeaver, there are ways to get to them. First, you can use Google Fonts with Foundation. That will give you a large selection if you want them. Then there are also stacks for fonts. Joe makes Font Pro which is great. I do know @instacks also makes one, but have never really used it. I believe there are a couple of other ones as well.

Very nicely done site!

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Thank you for your reply and your recmmandations, i Will look in to it.:+1:

@Ronald

I have an average 10Mbps internet connection and your site was painfully slow in loading.
This was unfortunately highlighted by the loading animation (I would suggest removing the % counter).

The slow loading is mainly caused by your images which are very weighty and unnecessarily large.
For example the backgroundImage_154 jpg is 6000 x 4000 and ‘weighs’ 10.3 MB. That’s way too big.

Consider reducing the Images in both size and quality.
A width of 1600 is plenty big enough even for a background and for general images something from 500 up to 1200 is probably fine.
Then heavily optimise them. I put your backgroundImage_154.jpg into photoshop elements 11 (my preferred tool, search the forum for others) and even at the crazy 6000 x 4000 I reduced it to 5MB with no apparent loss of quality.
Reducing the size down to 1600 width I got it to 360 KB.

Google will penalise you for heavy images and worse, many people will give up waiting for the site to load and simply leave.

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@Ronald

I ran your site against GTMetrix (A web tool that I use frequently); you may want to look at their recommendations as well. Keep in mind that there are some things you can’t fix within RW.

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I have an average 500Mbps up and download internet connection Fiber Optic.

Each House in Voorthuizen is connected by cable and fiber optic they all have an average 100Mbps connection or higher, I asked the visitors of the site, how they think about the performances of the site. overall opinion is Good, OK.
I had last week over 1000 visitors on the site, i think that’s a good start for an site.

The website test tells me the site has a overall good performance, tested the site with a iPhone 7 (4g) and iPad (4g) the overall performance is good.

Never the less I have noted your recommendations and critics, thank you so much and I am going to use your recommendations to improve the site.

That is a good move. Not that I have a personal interest in your site’s topic but keep in mind that some locations do not have particularly high speed access. Where I am a good results is 2Mbps but it’s usually more like 1Mbps. ADSL 1 at the very edge of it’s reach and no alternative in sight!

All the best.

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I looked at your site out of curiosity.
For a ‘First Website’ it’s great, but…
… I’m based in Thailand and have the fastest connection available.

It took just under ten minutes to load your homepage, so I looked to see why…
Your first image is a thumbnail displayed at a width of 145px. However the image is 5084 × 2639px and weighs over 3 Mb.
It was the last image to fully load because the browser is having to render the image at the requested size.
Whilst not many people outside of your town are likely to want to research Voorthuizen, do remember that more than 60% of your visitors are likely to be using a mobile phone where every Kb costs Euro Cents!

The aforementioned Thumbnail shouldn’t weigh in at more than 10Kb.

Ansonsten Prima!!

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I changed the size, now it’s less then 10 Kb. Thanks for your critics and recommendations.

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