pictures

[greenoak]

we are deciding how many pictures to put on our landing page ....
i know people with dial up are real concerened with pictures taking a long time to load....but arent t hey a pretty small group?
besides the dial up people are there any issues about using with a lot of pictures?, meaning 5 or 10 plus visuals on the sides....
how do you judge about too many pictures slowing down loading time?
i have a new acer 5530 travelmate computer with windows 7 and dsl, and we are on a network with 4 or 5 equal or older computers ....... and have no trouble loading big pages ...can i use my downloading experience as about the norm?
thanks
ann....

[Spider]

Here's a trick I used in the old - slower - days, when I had a scubadiving site with lots of big, detailed and heavy underwater photographs.

People take time to look at the photos and read the text you provide. Use that time for their computer to download your next picture.

1. Give them something to read along with a small picture that loads quickly.

2. Make the first big picture a striking picture but one that is a smaller file than most - something they are likely to linger at.

3. Follow that, below the fold, with a tiny version (1px x 1px) of the next big picture. This pre-loads the picture into their cache while they are looking at the previous pciture. They won't see 1px x 1px but the picture still loads into their computer memory.

4. Then, when they are ready to move on - in my case, click to the next galery page - the next picture is already preloaded into their computer and will appear immediately.

5. While they are looking at that one, do the same and let their computer download the next picture -- and so on.

If that isn't clear, ask, and I'll try again.

[Harold Mansfield]

I don't worry about dial up people anymore. These days a phone is faster than that.
If you start with a decent quality to begin with, it's easier to compress them to a manageable size without to much degradation.
If you use, for instance, a 600px by 800px .jpg without any compression, it's going to give the average person fits depending on their connection and RAM anyway.

Another determining factor is what else is loading on the page?
If you have a bunch of scripts, ads, and feeds trying to propagate (for the length of the entire first page), a lot of images can add to that load time.
So if you have an abnormally long landing page with tons of stuff loading, you can adjust the length ( as in how many posts of a blog you show) to buy yourself some more bandwidth.

[Spider]

Although computers and internet connections are definitely faster these days, it may be that people are getting more used to the fast load times and are less tolerant of slow loading sites. IOW, people are, I suggest, more impatient than ever. Besides, many folk on this site - especially Harold - have super fast machines and possibly T1 connecions that would put NASA to shame! I know I still come across sites that I click away from before they have loaded.

So I suggest you still have to pay attention to how fast your site downloads, even though few people in the US are still on dialup. Especially if you are expecting visits from overseas. While many parts of the world may even be superior to the US, many areas of thise countries have older connections, older cables and older machines.

[greenoak]

is my computer and situation about average? acer travelmate laptop 5530 with dsl....???
i want to figure if i can load it easy and IF im average then i wont worry....
if i have some super duper computer that will load anything faswter than most folks, then i need to know.... thats my question....
...
thanks eborg...ill have her check the sizes
i hear you on the words spider...thanks

[Harold Mansfield]

DSL is about average for most people.

When I say sizes, I mean the density, not the dimensions. 2 photos of the same size can be tremendously different when it comes to density.

For instance:
Before - 32.7 KB (33,524 bytes)
http://1stinternetmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/ed-and-sian-0109_001.jpg

After - 7.19 KB (7,366 bytes)
http://1stinternetmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/ed-and-sian-compressed2.jpg

The second one will load faster.

Source:
Compress Images No Quality Loss (http://www.ezau.com/latest/articles/compress-images.shtml)

[greenoak]

I GOT that....thanks....i will show her your explanation....
is that you harold?

[Harold Mansfield]

is that you harold?
No.That's just some random photos from the example in the article.