Page Loading Problems

My background takes ages to load

How large is your background graphic? This page uses a 2Kb graphic, large graphics take up many kilobytes of storage and consequently the larger the graphic that longer the time taken to download to the user. Use smaller graphics if you feel you need that picture on your site have it there as a picture not a background.

My image(s) take forever to download

This problem is due to the size of the image(s) the larger the image file size the longer it will take to download. There are a few ways around this one:

For photographs: Make thumbnail image(s) of the photo(s) and place in you page - thumbnails are typically 100X100 to 200X200 pixels in size and download reasonably quickly, link each thumbnail to a new page which will contain the full-size photo - if the user wants to view the photo they wont mind waiting for this. I use this technique in the Canaries Holiday Snaps section of this site.

You could also try to optimise the photo by running it though JPEG optimisation software to increase the compression (make the file smaller) but this becomes a trade off between size and quality - the more you compress the greater the reduction in quality.

You could also try to save them as GIF files but be aware GIFs have only 256 colours so the quality of a photo would suffer significantly.