Use thumbnails for cripes sake
This is dedicated to those special people who like to screw with my head (and internet connection) by not using thumbnails. I don’t really feel like have to load 3, 4, 100 or 200 images that are all high resolution and not properly thumbnailed! Seriously, have you ever actually tried loading that kind of sucker? It’s horrible, it really is!
The sad thing is, is that a large portion of the ICSFP crowd likes to simply resize the image within the <img> tag and walk away! Can you believe that cause I just can’t. While I can sympathize with those who have a large amount of images to crop into thumbnails (trust me, I used to do it for Texturezilla, may it rest in peace, and it was a major pain in the butt), but shouldn’t we be thinking of our visitors instead of ourselves? I mean, if you have good content, but the content is inaccessible to the visitor then the visitor will leave and never return. Bad first impressions are instant killers, there isn’t really any better way to drive people away than by doing something like merely resizing large images.
Before anyone wonders, these images that I’m talking about are all mainly 1000px+ in height and width, when you go to load the page, with the resized images, you’re loading 100+ high-res images! And I would imagine, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, that it’s bandwidth intensive as well (imagine people loading multiple images that are sometimes as large as 3mb on your site).
So to recap: Using <img src="image.jpg" height="100px" width="100px"> is unacceptable when the images are high-res and over 1000px either way. The best solution is to use thumbnails, while it may be more labour intensive it’ll probably be worth the while, repeat visitors are everything.
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#3
One of my pet peeves, too. And some site owners are oddly defensive when you point it out. Since physically resized images generally look better than HTML-resized images anyway, I would have thought it’d be in the site owner’s interest to make proper thumbnails too.
The worst offender I’ve seen was the Million Dollar Homepage. Yeearrgh.
(By the way, the text in the comment boxes is slightly misaligned for me – I’m on 1024 res. and whatever was the last version of Firefox before 2.0.)
#4
I’ll admit that when I was first learning HTML for my very first site I did that. Back in 1999 when I didn’t know better.
Still people need to learn that it is basically a must if you want people to keep coming back to your site. (and if they give you the excuse of not having photoshop tell them about the GIMP or the online image editors).
Hi I'm Becky, often referred to as The Knitting Hillbilly and Pussybear, owner of this site and general nuisance. I'm a knitter, serial complainer, known whistle blower and I run the ever popular
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