Two 25Kb images too large for 56k? (opinions please)

Saberu · 26 Apr 2006 at 15:38

I was having an argument with my friend about this because he seemed to think that filesize was too large, his justification being that users would quit the page instead of waiting 10 seconds for the images to load while reading the content.

I believe if the images were background images or banners he would have a point but the images are part of the content as they are photos. And I needed that level of detail in the images to explain them properly; aswell as thinking that what difference is a couple of seconds waiting (could have made them 15kb but would have been lossy) when the benefit is the image doesn't look nasty.

The website was for my WDD assignment and my tutor that demo'd it also said the images were too large and should have been 4Kb which is stupid because 4Kb images are either so lossy or so low res you can't see what things are.

Page in question- http://www.saberu.f2s.com/sport/badminton.html

Al Vallario · 26 Apr 2006 at 16:34

Saberu said:
I was having an argument with my friend about this because he seemed to think that filesize was too large, his justification being that users would quit the page instead of waiting 10 seconds for the images to load while reading the content.

I believe if the images were background images or banners he would have a point but the images are part of the content as they are photos. And I needed that level of detail in the images to explain them properly; aswell as thinking that what difference is a couple of seconds waiting (could have made them 15kb but would have been lossy) when the benefit is the image doesn't look nasty.

The website was for my WDD assignment and my tutor that demo'd it also said the images were too large and should have been 4Kb which is stupid because 4Kb images are either so lossy or so low res you can't see what things are.

Page in question- http://www.saberu.f2s.com/sport/badminton.html

Your friend and tutor are talking rubbish, in my opinion. 25KB/image for those kind of photos is quite impressive to be honest. Plus, they're contextual, and the content wouldn't make sense without them. To 56k users it may be a few seconds worth of downloading, but isn't everything? If you take the images out or reduce the quality, what about the 1Mbps users who download the entire site in under a second, or the 10Mbps users (provided the server can pump out at that kind of speed) who download it all in a milisecond?

To be honest, I haven't thought about backwards compatability with 56k users for a long time now. Broadband adoption in the UK has been quite impressive, and we're miles behind other countries

punky_munky · 26 Apr 2006 at 16:46

Yeah, I tend not to consider 56k users all that much either. I mean, when I do save for web in Photoshop I try to make sure the images aren't huge and if it's a big image I'll try and find the optimal settings but on the whole it's not like it used to be. I'm sure most 56k users are well aware that they're on a rubbish connection. Broadband companies seem to be advertising 1/2mb as the norm now too.

cb_linus · 26 Apr 2006 at 16:59

Seems ok in the context, as I'd probably just read the text while the image is loading although I would probably add a coment to your images incase they *do* take ages to download on a 56k connection (several tabs / pages may be opening at the same time which may cause an overall slowdown in download speed).

|Ric| · 26 Apr 2006 at 17:03

Just copy the page and make a "lite" version and give users the choice, everyone is happy.
I haven't had the misfortune to use 56k for a long time but I'm sure I was pretty used to waiting the best part of 10 seconds for images.

AS_Platinum · 26 Apr 2006 at 17:03

btw site don't display correctly here,

Header image is about 30% left of what it should be (ie: not centre)
Content Text is the same

Those 2 images are centred correctly.

footer is the same as the header

The background is fine and dandy.

Thats using IE, Works fine in FF tho (isn't that a suprise)

Saberu · 26 Apr 2006 at 17:18

AS_Platinum said:
Thats using IE, Works fine in FF tho (isn't that a suprise)

Yeah I knew about that problem, only seems to happen when I put images in. Must be a bug in IE to do with CSS and image alignment as my CSS is w3c validated. Nice to see everyone agrees with me about the file size being ok, thought I was going crazy before

edit: I have an idea of what the bug is, i think because i've aligned the contents in a division tag to float left and then made the pictures inside that tag aligned center there is some formatting that IE doesn't know how to handle.

robmiller · 26 Apr 2006 at 18:19

Is your site smaller than most pages on the web? Yes.
Do 56k users, then, have to put up with a greater or equally long wait on all the other sites they visit? Yes.
Will 56k users notice the difference when visiting your site? No.

Augmented · 26 Apr 2006 at 19:22

robmiller said:
Do 56k users, then, have to put up with a greater or equally long wait on all the other sites they visit? Yes.

Definitely.

Code:

news.bbc.co.uk - 197KB
www.yahoo.co.jp - 120KB
www.msn.com - 130KB 

badminton.html - 91KB

Three of the most-visited sites currently on the interweb weigh in over 120KB (OcUK's front page weighs in at 187KB!), which is at best around a 20s wait for slowdem users.

So in terms of initial page load, there's no issue even with the additional weight of those two relevant images that can load while the user is reading the article. Of course, those sites above use many small images, rather than few large images, so the comparison isn't entirely fair.

One good technique that should be used for serving large content images to low bandwidth audiences is to ensure the image attributes for width and height are filled. By doing this the renderer doesn't have to recalculate the space it needs to reserve for the image once it's loaded. It will create a placeholder, allowing the image to load without causing the surrounding content to 'bounce' about. The worst thing for a reader is to have the paragraph they're reading plummet 500 pixels downwards when a weighty image -higher up in the page- finally finishes loading

.

Gavstar · 27 Apr 2006 at 00:20

They seem fine to me, certainly not too long to make want to give up, It wasn't even the end of the world on 28k!

Oh, and I'm not on 56k, I viewed the page using sloppy, quite a handy little tool!