Adding a forum to page

[Npierce]

Hi all,
I always have found great help here, so.....

Is there a way to easily add a private forum to my page? What I am looking for is a general forum that as Admin. I can manually add members (not require them to be approved etc...). It will be a password protected forum so I will need to assign a user name / password. I do have reasons for doing it this way.

Also...adding photos to a site. I have a "photos" page and I am adding photos for each event. Even resized it is causing the page / photos to load slowly. I have taken it a step further and made each event a seperate page - you click on the event you want to view phots from & get a new window for that specific event. Still adding a lot of time to the photo pages load.
I looked at the photo album on FP but that didn't really help. I would have to do a seperate album for each event, unless I am missing something.
So, any ideas on photos would be great. I guess I may have to link to an outside photo hosting... I haven't checked w/ GoDaddy (my hosting co.) as I came here for guidance first. lol


The page I am working on is www.fireandiron43.com

Thanks for any input!
Nikki

[MandyJay]

Hi,
Not sure this is what you are after, but on my village site I use the phpboard
(www.MonktonCombe.com/family) .. it is free, but you can make all the threads invisible to the public and only viewable to members - the whole forum can be password protected as you just put it in a subweb which itself is password protected (check out our tutorial section). People can either post as a guest (no sign up) or sign up but dont need authorization from you - there are a ton of different skins to choose from to make it more like your site. It is not as adaptable as this forum we use here, but then this one you pay for a license to use, so would expect more features - I am sure there are other forums out there suitable for your purposes and hopefuly people will post with their suggestions .....

Photos .... I clicked a few links but could not find any photos ??? In any event you say resize your photos ... you have to resample as well, by resizing you have changed the width and height but not the whole file size as far as kb is concerned. You have to resample to do that. On the link you gave the two logs at top of the page left and right ... they are around 25 kb each .... for a start that equals what most pages should be in total 50kb ...(for dial up at least) .... they can be got down in size far more. For a start their real size is over 296 pixels wide x 398 high - all you did was to reduce the size but not "fix" the KB size by resampling (on the pictures toolbar of FP - after you have reduced the pixel size and highlighted your image click on the small square than when you mouse over says "resample" .... ).

I just had a quick go at resampling your image. I changed it into a .gif in my optimizing program and got it down to around 10kb - at the moment it is 25kb. Also at the bottom of the page, the numbers - they are around 11kb each at the moment, I got them down to around 2kb each. So your page without any text or any other images, just the logos, background image and the numbers comes to nearly 90kb ...

As for photo album, as long as you dont use the slideshow, the FrontPage albums would be so quick and easy for you to make. Even having one for each event, would only take a very short time to make them.

GoDaddy, great for buying domain names, but in my experience they dont know one end of FrontPage fromn the other.

Anyway hope some of that information will assist you

MJ

[Npierce]

Thank You MJ!!

It is waaaay too early to work on the page, but I will!