Forum Moderators: not2easy
the header of my site is sliced to allow for part of the image to be a background to the site's search engine and text.. the other part is just the logo. both images together are approximately 750 x 80 px
is there a way to shrink the loading time/size while keep ing the quality steady?
also dial up at what speed? and what size in KB are your finished images? ..
>>what size in KB are your finished images? ..
the largest image of the bunch is 19.72 kb
You should make them "progressive" ( gives em something to wonder about whilst the image is resolving )..
Also presuming ( never hurts to verify ;) that you are placing them at no higher than 72dpi res?
You could .gif them depending on what type they are ..tonal , block color whatever?
What counts the most is how long the page overall takes to load ..most people dont read so fast so if you can get your page in less than 6 seconds on dialup then they will still be reading the second line when the image is finished .
Also presuming ( never hurts to verify ;) that you are placing them at no higher than 72dpi res?
The oft-mysterious "resolution" of an image is irrelevant in a save for web export, though while working on the file, changing the resolution may change the width and height of the image in pixels... if your px are what you want them to be at for width/height, don't worry about resolution. It can be 7dpi or 7,000dpi.
Also I noticed that the O.P.'s comment was a little cryptic, and that the replies missed what he was saying (so did I on first read), which is that the "Save for Web" export that he is using is ESTIMATING that the pic will load in 2-3 secs on 56k... he hasn't actually tested it on a PC with a dial-up connection.
Don't worry about how many seconds some program thinks it might take to download your file... just pay attention to size- both of a single image and of the collection of content on the page. Optimize your images accordingly for your audience (assumedly your audience is heavy on the 56k side, yes?). 19k is fine for your biggest image, if you have only one at that size and the rest are more like 6k... again, we don't really know how big your code is, how many images you have... but don't kill yourself over it; there's more to life than artifacted Jpegs.
You might not need the whole header to be an image. If there is a background image then just cut out the logo and text and use the HTML to fill in the background color. THat should save some bandwidth.
Progressive JPGs
Although progressive jpgs usually have a slightly smaller file size, that isn't enough for me to counter-balance the fact that IE doesn't actually render them progressively. Instead it requires the full file to be downloaded first and then displays the image "all at once". If you're being attentive to users with slow connections, they're better off seeing a regular jpg fill in line by line.
yes i have not actually "tested" it on a dialup connection. i am only going by photoshop's estimates, and here is an output of the overall page from websiteoptimization:
Total HTTP Requests:14
Total Size:89979 bytes
Object typeSize (bytes)
HTML:15297
HTML Images:50703
CSS Images:11403
Total Images:62106
Javascript:2268
CSS:10308
Multimedia:0
Other:0
Total HTML:1
Total HTML Images:10
Total CSS Images:1
Total Images:11
Total Scripts:1
Total CSS imports:1
Total Frames:0
Total Iframes:0
Connection RateDownload Time
14.4K 69.94 seconds
28.8K 35.07 seconds
33.6K 30.09 seconds
56K 18.13 seconds
ISDN 128K 5.69 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 0.68 seconds
keep the day job ..
or trim the page total to 40 kb max and better still to 20 kb ( OK .. 30kb ;) or so including thumbs to your larger images ..
your CSS file is humunguosly big what do you keep in there ..your car? cold beers?
