franke1

Although most people feel that a website is made more interesting when there are graphics on the site, do not put in too many graphics and make the size of your website too large. Viewers can become frustrated if a website takes too long to download and will go to another website.

__________________
Thank a Bunch!

www.MaxGXL.com |
MaxGxl
glutathione

penguinmama

That's a good point. A good rule of thumb is to check it on a dialup connection. If it takes more than eight seconds to load, trim it back a bit. Most people will click away if it doesn't load in 8 seconds.

Also, if you check which format is smaller (sometimes .gif is smaller, sometimes .jpg, sometimes .png) and use it, that will help. And if your pictures are small instead of huge, you can use more without overloading.

paperclip

Those are very good points. Also using thumbnails can help a bunch, as long as the file is in fact a thumbnail, not scaled down through HTML code.

I wonder who and how they figured out the 8 second thing.

__________________
If it ain't broke, fix it until it is

Melos

Most graphics programs also allow you to prepare the graphics file for the web by condensing it. You can shave off a lot of load time that way.

melissajean85

I think it depends on your audience, for example if you create a site targeted at web designers, most will have a high speed connection and the graphics will load a lot faster than dial-up so you can use much better quality graphics and more of them. If you are designing a site for say a pizza delivery service, you are going to want it to be as accessible as possible, so make it load fast by limiting the number and size of graphics.

kconnections

This is a very good point too. If your target market are those who will have high speed internet and excellent computers than you might very well want ot use a lot of graphics.

-thoma-

I don't mind pages that fill the screen, but I hate pages that have way too much content at once. Everything is kind of just popping out at you and you cannot find anything. I love simple but creative pages though.

SeeMe

I like simple pages too. Simple but informative - and easy to use. Nothing irritates me more than pictures that pop up out of nowhere, moving banners and videos that play commercials on websites. It takes a long to load and will only frustrate the consumer when they realize that they are being slowed down to watch an ad!

Melos

If your website is targetted to graphic designers, however, you would think that they would appreciate you knowing that you can reduce the size of the image file to get a quicker load time.

Oh yes... those video ads and marquee banners etc. are horrid.

paperclip

I like simple pages, but with css layouts and such I find myself liking the more colorful or creative ones. The simple sites are now too bland to me.

__________________
If it ain't broke, fix it until it is