I’ve took it upon myself to redesign a website last night, and it only took me 3 hours to do the whole thing. It validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict, and uses CSS, of course. The old site was using very old code, and it was a pure mess, not to mention redudant and taking up precious bandwidth.

The total size of the old site was 80KB, which takes approximately 20 seconds for those people on dialup. The ideal time limit for a page to load up for dialup is within 8 seconds. Most people do not like waiting for more than 10 seconds, and the quicker it loads, the better the impressions are of that site. The new site, has a total size of 39KB, half of the old site. That is approximately 8.5 seconds on dialup, and I haven’t truly optimized the site yet. The majority of that size comes from the header graphic, which is 33KB itself. Once compressed, I can cut the size down to about 20KB, perhaps. Needless to say, the new site loads quicker, looks better, and supports the latest standards. It works on every browser except Opera 7 and those that don’t support CSS. I’m looking to see if it’s a bug that’s causing Opera to have a fit.

Here’s the before and after redesign: Before Redesign | After Redesign