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Better transition between pages

I'm redeveloping our company's website. The background image is going to be an image that's a white background with a green bar going across in the middle. The same background is used for every page. when I change to different pages, that background image reloads and doesn't immediately appear with the rest of the content. I've seen pages that it looks like only a certain area of the page changes and the rest (including a backgroudn image) doesn't have to reload. Any suggestions on how to get this done?

I'm using Dreamweaver CS3 for site development.

Julian Matz

Normally images should get cached. Check to see what response code is being sent for the URL of your image.

You can check this here:

http://www.pagerank.net/http-header-viewer/
http://www.ircache.net/cgi-bin/cacheability.py

sedberg1

ASKER

From the first link:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 6134
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Location: http://www.floormuffler.com/index.html
Last-Modified: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:07:09 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "82493039f92ec91:3ea"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:26:03 GMT

From the second link:
http://www.floormuffler.com
Expires -
Cache-Control -
Last-Modified 1 hr 19 min ago (Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:07:09 GMT) validated
ETag "82493039f92ec91:3ea"
Content-Length 6.0K (6134)
Server Microsoft-IIS/6.0

This object doesn't have any explicit freshness information set, so a cache may use Last-Modified to determine how fresh it is with an adaptive TTL (at this time, it could be, depending on the adaptive percent used, considered fresh for: 15 min 56 sec (20%), 39 min 51 sec (50%), 1 hr 19 min (100%)). It can be validated with Last-Modified.

sedberg1

ASKER

Could you please help me to understand what this stuff means?

Julian Matz

I meant the URL of the actual image.
Where is the background image you're using?

sedberg1

ASKER

it was a test site only accessible internally. And I got rid of the previous pages that wwere being a problem. I need to add more pages but I know I'm going to come across the same things in the future. I thought this was something that could've been done without lookking at the actual site. I know I've seen something before where this has been done.

sedberg1

ASKER

Here's the site, but it's nowhere near done since I redid the layout it has only one page:

http://67.103.165.7

Julian Matz

Well, the NORMAL behaviour is that the image is cached and therefore doesn't need to be reloaded after each subsequent request. If this was not the case then there'd be something wrong, which is why I suggested checking the response headers.

sedberg1

ASKER

I'm not talking about caching the images when someone's looking at them. I'm talking about only having parts of a page change when someone clicks a link. An example is www.vai.net. Toward the middle of the home page, there are five tabs (what's new, learn about, etc) and the page doesn't reload, only the tabs change.

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Julian Matz

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sedberg1

ASKER

Well, for a non-programmer, looks like I'll be needing someone's help with this.

Julian Matz

Well, if you're confident enough with HTML, it's really not as difficult as it might first seem. The two links I posted have some tutorials and examples that you could have a look at to see if it might be something you could do without investing too much time.