How do you get a site that has good looks and a fast loading time?

Ive been trying for ages and ive never achived It?

HELP?!

A site with good looks does not always have to be flooded with graphics. however if you do want a lot of graphics to make the site look good then it all depends on the compression of the graphics. you can only compress them a certain amount without losing quality. a good idea is to always use Jpegs or Png's as the image types.

NEVER USE BITMAPS

The good looks depends on how talented the designer is. If you cannot think of anything decent or you can but you cannot make it then the site isn't going to be worth much unless you have a very rich content. sometimes minimilistic is best. for my site i don't have many graphics except a header and a few section titles. I have used CSS to make the site look a lot better, a good and constant colour theme is always good, for mine i use white and light greys with a nice red and green for the header although the amount of those colours has been minimised.

A good decent looking site with a fast loading time is not always possible, you have to have patience and usually you cannot whip up a good site in a couple of minutes. look around the web for examples there are many many great sites out there with a lot of graphics and many with only a couple but very effective graphics.

If you want the site to be a little faster you should look into JAvascript Image Pre-loaders so all of the site images are cached once and do not have to be downloaded on every page that is visited.

Also you can optimise the coding, get rid of un-necessary lines of code and silly little things like Javascript and DHTML features (clocks, cursor following images and the like).

good luck. patience is a virtue

Zymic has a good tutorial for that here

If you want more colors in your site without slowing it down, you can just use colors for most of your pages. (I can't word it very well...) When you examine this forum, you will see that most of its colors are not images, but simply just... colors. There are some graphics used here and there for a gradient or some buttons, but there's not much. The slow loading time of this site is not because of its graphics, but because of its ad server.

I understand what you mean szupie

if you have something which spans the width of the page like a gradient then you can set the background of the table or cell to the colour which it fades out to and then cut the image so the image itself ends where the actual colour begins. also if you have a continuing pattern of maybe 4 different coloured lines instead of making it 1024 pixels long or whatever to fix the width of the screen just take a slice which is the height of the image and a pixel in width and set the background to repeat that image.

don't know if that was any better szupie lol.