Monday, April 17, 2006

Frustrating Folks

This is a large freestanding wind chime. It turns out that trying to show it life size on the Web is a mistake. Live and learn. For more information on this wind chime, or to buy it, Click here.

Looking around the web learning about web pages, I was struck by the constant warnings not to use large image sizes. That struck me because my image host allows images up to 200k, and I had been taking advantage of that. My images, it turned out, were way too large.

What really grabbed my attention was a person writing that out of a bunch of his web pages, one was being skipped over. Looking at those pages, the only difference was that this one was 7k larger than the others. He had trouble believing that this small difference could account for the lack of time people were spending, but after reducing the size, the statistics started matching the other pages. Wow.

So this weekend I have been reducing the size and quality of all my JPEGS~ 90 images. Slightly over half way through with the job, and yesterday my counts almost doubled. Coincidence? I doubt it. I can only barely remember what it was like when I had a dial-up connection ~ the long wait for an image to appear. I guess I was really giving people a headache with my large images. Sorry. Live and learn.

4 comments:

  1. Dial-up is frustrating, especially when there's a lot of images included. A good guideline is to always try to keep the index page of any website to 35kb in size. That way anyone can visit and make their own choice about what they want to do next.
    I'm using a flash gallery for all my pictures, no matter if it's drawings, paintings of photography. It will shrink down the pictures automatically and make the timeframe for anyone less of a hassel. And it also protects the images from being downloaded.

    But yes, big images can be a pain for those who's not on broadband.

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  2. Hi Christa,
    Thank you for the comment. I used to have just my images at almost 200k, and sometimes two or more of those. So I guess that's way over what anyone with dial-up would enjoy~ huh? I was trying to figure out how to use file mapping-- a click on the thumbnail to see the full size --but couldn't find a clear answer on how to do that. Thanks again. Tim.

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  3. 200k might be a bit too big, yes... :) As for using thumbnails and have a bigger size to open when you click, you'll need two images and a tiny piece of HTML written. It's fairly simple...as so many other things are when you know howto ;)

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  4. Hi Christa,
    oh yes~ it's always Soooo easy.... when you know how to do it! Thanks. Tim/.

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