Pages: 
Most of you guys are magic ,, thanks so much . now back to other photos.. Regards Jan
PS : A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE GOES A LONG WAY ..
Member
From: Bega, Sapphire Coast Australia
Registered: 2005-08-18
Posts: 1487
I've been thanked 39 times.
Offline
Well, G'day.
First up, Jan, I see you have 22 posts up on SR forum. You're almost a long standing member! How about giving yourself a photo avatar so we know whether we're talking to a male Jan or a female Jan? We might even pick up a bit more information about you from a small photo. Go to your "Profile" at the top of this page.
Thought I'd give a little basic info on backgrounds, since there is some obvious confusion.
Here's the background in question.
The version that you see when you visit Jan's website isn't on Jan's site. It's on the Freewebs site. Jan's site hotlinks to it. Here's the code with the address:
Code: html
<body style="background:url('http://www.freewebs.com/Backgrounds/Green/bg1.jpg');">
So the address is actually:
Code: html
http://www.freewebs.com/Backgrounds/Green/bg1.jpg
If I was using a background on my site I'd put it on my own web space.
Here's the background that I'm using on a site that I'm currently building. The address is:
Code: html
http://www.southimage.net/bega-show-2008/redcube.jpg
If you right click on the two background images displayed here and then click on Properties, you'll see that Jan's background is 96px x 96px and is 1.27kb.
96px x 96px is the size that it displays on the screen and 1.27kb is the file size. 1.27kb is a pretty small file an image file.
Similarly, my background image is 64px x 64px and has a file size of 1.79kb.
Background images are often referred to as tile images, because, unless you tell it otherwise, the background repeats, or tiles, to fill the whole page.
But the background doesn't take a lot of bandwidth to download and it doesn't take long to fill the page because it only downloads once and repeats. (Thought I needed to repeat that.)
So, suppose you're using a 56k modem. That's a modem with a download speed of 56 kb per second (56kb/s)
In practice, because the phone line will be a bit degraded, you may download at about 50 kb per second.
A 1kb file will download in 0.2 seconds, so Jan's background tile will download once and repeat to fill the whole page in about a quarter of a second. In Australia we refer to that kind of speed as "quick as a flash."
But there's more! When you visit a web page, the files that make up the page are saved to the temporary internet files folder on your computer's hard drive. So when you visit that page again, the files don't come down the phone line at 56kb/s, they come direct from the temporary internet files folder of your computer.
This will be pretty fast. In the case of the background tile, to use another Australian expression, that will be "quicker than a flash."
So, you see, it's not the background file that's slowing the opening of Jan's site, it's the other image files.
Now, Jan hasn't removed the background tile file. He hasn't found it in the code yet. That's OK. Wouldn't help the download speed if he did.
The reason the site is opening faster on the second visit is that Jan's oversized image files are stored in your temporary internet files folder and only have to load from your own computer, not down the phone line.
So with this in mind, here's a design principle for people who have image rich web sites such as my photography sites:
When designing an image rich web site, keep the images on the home page to a minimum, maybe one or two.
The header images, which are repeated on each page of the site, will load when the home page is opened, and be stored in the temporary internet file folder of your visitor's computer.
Then, when they open the second page, the header opens almost instantly and the images, unique to that page, download, down the phone line, in a reasonable time, making the time for the page to open reasonable.
I should point out that slide shows, videos and to some extent animations, are huge files. Download time is one good reason to avoid these. If you must incorporate them, don't make them an automatic download. New web builders would do well to avoid these altogether.
You'll find it helpful to keep your header image to less than 20kb, preferably between 12kb and 15kb. Images on the page can be rendered at adequate quality and physical size at around 35kb to 50kb.
Over half a dozen images on a page is probably getting too much.
As you can see, I've gone to a bit of effort to provide this basic info. It's unfortunate that this information will be seen by few of the new web builders to whom it is directed and who should read it before submitting slow loading pages for review.
Perhaps I can copy and paste it as a new post in the "Good Site Building" section of SR.
Best wishes,
Laurie.
Australian Exploration and Adventure on Horseback and Motorbike
Just so you know i am female.. lol ill try and find a photo .. Jan
Administrator
From: Colorado, USA
Registered: 2006-02-15
Posts: 2176
I've been thanked 91 times.
Offline
laurie_m wrote:
First up, Jan, I see you have 22 posts up on SR forum. You're almost a long standing member!
Yup, just about time to raise the height of the hurdles. 
Not to worry Jan, just been a while since we had somebody new to pick on. 
Attention designers and webmasters - "The Beauty of CSS"
Valid Web Designs tutorials on HTML, XHTML and CSS
Home Security Systems
Lol . No worries i can generally give as good as i get.
| Never |
You are not logged in.
