Posted by Dan Borzynski on July 11, 2006 at 10:44 AM
I am stuck on dialup, at least for the forseeable future. Not really a problem, except when I go to my own website. I have come to the realization that it downloads really slow, to the point where I don't look at it from home.
So here is my question: are there things which can be done, or avoided, to help it download faster?
The most obvious thing is to reduce the image size on the larger images, but some of them seriously start to degrade if they get much smaller. They are, for the most part, about as small as I am comfortable with.
Most of the files come through on a table, if that matters.
I am using Frontpage, no fancy programming, flash, Java scripts, or anything like that. Just kept it simple.
Any suggestions, even if they may not apply to the my current website, would be appreciate for future updates (and for anyone else setting up a website).
Dan, I looked at your site and your images seem to be of reasonable size. Dialup is just inherently slow, unfortunately.
One thing you can do is add a low-resolution version and a "lowsrc=" property to your "img" tags. This will load the small low-resolution version first, then overlay it with the higher resolution image as it loads.
I'm not sure this will work in your case where the images are used as backgrounds. This may offer some minimal protection, but at the same time it also means most browsers will load the image last,after all other HTML and formatting.
Taking a quick look at your page, most of your thumbnails are pretty big as far as thunbnails go. Probably over 1/4 the size of your larger images. If you cut down the size of your thumbnails, the overall page would load faster. Now someone could go to your thumbnail page and not go any farther, since they have seen the image at a viewable size. Cutting them down may entice the viewer to continue on to the larger sizes. You could creatively crop the thumnails too so they are smaller, and inriguing to look at. This would invite the viewer to click and see the large graphic, as well as speeding up the general feel of the site.
Posted by Robert Helms on July 11, 2006 at 8:36 PM
Dan, I'm also stuck on dial up and I feel your pain. I recall doing an interent search related to this very subject. I'm in the process of creating a website and load time is a factor. Most people who view photo sites are on dsl or cable, but I wanted it to load at a decent time for dial up users as well.
On my site I've made all the thumbnails 99pixels in height. I feel that is large enough to give the viewer an idea of the image. I think all my thumbs are no more than 3kb in size. Your thumbs are larger and I'm sure result in larger file sizes.
I also created two images for each photo. One is a larger image that is no more than 200kb and sized to 600 max in height. The smaller image is about 400 in height and with a file size usually under 70kb. The smaller one loads with a link to the larger version. I really only made the smaller ones for dial up users since I felt a 400 pix image in height was more than enough for them to decide it they wanted to view the larger version.
You may want to check your browser settings as well. I know that aol allows one to compress a web page more for quicker load times. If are on aol this option is under the settings tab along the toolbar then click on Internet [web] options.
There is an option within the control panel on your pc that holds your temporary internet files or something along this line. What it does is stores the pages you view for faster loading the next time. However, I'm not sure if it is possible to alter this setting to where one would be loading new info each time they visit a site or not. I know I clear my out once a month, but I do this manually and pages do load slower after doing so. I think what the file stores are cookies and I suppose if one ran a cookie washer program daily then it would cause your site to load slow everyday you went to it Best to ask one of the experts on here for help with this topic because I'm one of the guys that just clicks and clicks to see what something does.
On dial up I connect at a whopping 52kb and only on a few occasions do I find photographers sites too slow to wait on - this includes yours.
Discussion
3 repliesSo here is my question: are there things which can be done, or avoided, to help it download faster?
The most obvious thing is to reduce the image size on the larger images, but some of them seriously start to degrade if they get much smaller. They are, for the most part, about as small as I am comfortable with.
Most of the files come through on a table, if that matters.
I am using Frontpage, no fancy programming, flash, Java scripts, or anything like that. Just kept it simple.
Any suggestions, even if they may not apply to the my current website, would be appreciate for future updates (and for anyone else setting up a website).
One thing you can do is add a low-resolution version and a "lowsrc=" property to your "img" tags. This will load the small low-resolution version first, then overlay it with the higher resolution image as it loads.
I'm not sure this will work in your case where the images are used as backgrounds. This may offer some minimal protection, but at the same time it also means most browsers will load the image last,after all other HTML and formatting.
Guy
Taking a quick look at your page, most of your thumbnails are pretty big as far as thunbnails go. Probably over 1/4 the size of your larger images. If you cut down the size of your thumbnails, the overall page would load faster. Now someone could go to your thumbnail page and not go any farther, since they have seen the image at a viewable size. Cutting them down may entice the viewer to continue on to the larger sizes. You could creatively crop the thumnails too so they are smaller, and inriguing to look at. This would invite the viewer to click and see the large graphic, as well as speeding up the general feel of the site.
On my site I've made all the thumbnails 99pixels in height. I feel that is large enough to give the viewer an idea of the image. I think all my thumbs are no more than 3kb in size. Your thumbs are larger and I'm sure result in larger file sizes.
I also created two images for each photo. One is a larger image that is no more than 200kb and sized to 600 max in height. The smaller image is about 400 in height and with a file size usually under 70kb. The smaller one loads with a link to the larger version. I really only made the smaller ones for dial up users since I felt a 400 pix image in height was more than enough for them to decide it they wanted to view the larger version.
You may want to check your browser settings as well. I know that aol allows one to compress a web page more for quicker load times. If are on aol this option is under the settings tab along the toolbar then click on Internet [web] options.
There is an option within the control panel on your pc that holds your temporary internet files or something along this line. What it does is stores the pages you view for faster loading the next time. However, I'm not sure if it is possible to alter this setting to where one would be loading new info each time they visit a site or not. I know I clear my out once a month, but I do this manually and pages do load slower after doing so. I think what the file stores are cookies and I suppose if one ran a cookie washer program daily then it would cause your site to load slow everyday you went to it Best to ask one of the experts on here for help with this topic because I'm one of the guys that just clicks and clicks to see what something does.
On dial up I connect at a whopping 52kb and only on a few occasions do I find photographers sites too slow to wait on - this includes yours.