Wetlook World Forum

Right now, at the bottom, I see these two:

Into the Water dedicated 150x30 banner, 2 k.

Jeans and Pants 468x60 banner -- shrunk by the HTML -- 34 k!

Think about the modem load time for 34 k of data (8 seconds at 4 k/sec) to load a tiny banner that could be as low as 2 k (0.5 sec) if it was scaled and optimised at the source.

Worse, by placing every image on a different server, you can't take any advantage of pipelining or keep-alive. Even requests to ask "has this image changed?" (standard If-Modified-Since conditional GET) require a separate three-way handshake to a new server and can't be chained via keep-alive.

Finally, the browser has to reduce every image to fit into all the slots.

This has to be the slowest-loading site I've ever seen, mostly from waiting for all the HTML to come in, but for people who surf in privacy mode (clear cache on exit), on dial-up etc, you could do a lot to help them by cleaning up the banner situation.

Ideally, you'd host them all on your own site to reduce the number of TCP connections and DNS lookups needed, but even if not, you could still improve it by ensuring that the various sites supply sensible images, scaled and cropped to fit.

The WetInRed site hosted its own copies of all the banners for the Links page, with this same flaw. It came to 500 k of banner images! (Imagine that on a modem ...) From scaling and roughly optimising them all I took 100 k or more off the total. 400 k is still a lot, but these are larger banners on Steve's site -- 468 px wide generally. Personally I prefer plain text for links in the first place, but maybe those on his page need reducing also? With reduced size comes reduced clarity and reduced impact ... Not sure what to do about that one.