Why is page so large?

[cookoonest]

I have a photo page that contains 18 photos (gifs and jpgs).

The page itself (without the photos) is not large but it shows up in
Explorer as almost 5MB.

Does this include the images?

If so, why are the images stored in the album page file?

Page is at http://www.dancedk.com/photoalbum.htm

Thanks

 

[Rick Budde]

No matter where you store your photos, they will have to
be downloaded when they are called for on your pages. The
rule of thumb is that your pages be not larger than 40kb
(not MB) to 60kb including any graphics. This is based on
the fact that a lot of visitors, myself included, use
dialup for their connection. Many visitors will simply
leave your site if they are not able to view it pretty
quickly. I gave up on your listed URL for that reason.

If you have graphics to display, you should create a
thumbnails page so that visitors can preview the pictures
before committing themselves to a longer download of a
larger picture.

Even larger pictures should be reduced in file size by
lowereing the resolution to something more in line with
what a computer monitor is capable of rather than what
photograhic paper and scanners can deliver.

How does one manipulate these pictures files you may ask?
Use a graphics program such as Photoshop Elements to
perform the "magic".

Also different folks have different tastes but the
background for your page did not coincide with mine. This
was the only time in my life that I wished I were color
blind.

 

[cookoonest]

I have been developing webpages for many years and am familiar with size
design requirements.

The page that is referenced does use FP Auto-Thumbnail. Check the source
code.

The website has been up and running for many years and was originally
designed under a previous version of Frontpage. It was only after upgrading
to FP 2003 that I noticed the photoalbum pages becoming very large.

I suspect that there might be a parameter or option in FP2003 that causes
the "linked to" photos to get included within the main page but I haven't
been able to find this or any other explanation.

 

[Ronx]

The page is 4.09MB in size, plus 200KB of images, plus the horrible music
(Ughh!!!), plus the Java (which my machine, and many others, cannot
display).

Could the size be the result of 51,600 (approx) lines in the HTML each
containing 82 spaces?

FrontPage will probably crash if you try using it to open this page, since
there are more than 32000 lines of code. Also note that there is a
non-blank line half way through this expanse of space(s).

The images add up to 200K, and should be optimised a lot more to a quarter
of the present size - use a graphics program, rather than FrontPage, to
create the thumbnails. Also 11_small.jpg does not display - it appears to
have a htm extension.

 

[Tom J]

The page is 4.09MB in size, plus 200KB of images, plus the horrible music
(Ughh!!!), plus the Java (which my machine, and many others, cannot
display).

As soon as the music came on I was out the door!! I hate being fed music I
didn't select myself.

Tom J

 

[cookoonest]

Thanks Ronx.

Problem was the thousands of blank lines that got inserted in the middle of
the HTML. Don't know how that happened but fixed it and page is down to 13K
where it used to be.

Reason for the (awful?) music is that the page is for a "West Coast Swing"
dance website.

Thanks to all for suggestions.

Have a Happy Holiday.

 

[Murray]

Any linked photo will be fetched from the server when the page is fetched.
This means that a 1K page of code with links to 20 x 10K images will have a
weight of 201K. In addition, if there are rollover images on the page,
those get added to the pot.

The target weight for any page is based on the notion of presenting
'engaging content'. It is felt that you have 10seconds to present 'engaging
content', and if you can't then your click-through rate increases
significantly. On a typical 56k dialup, 10 seconds means about 40-45K
weight.