Mistakes Resizing Images

Too often I see a page taking more than the normal amount of time to load and for no apparent reason.

In some cases, there is a tiny thumbnail of several images. But they are not actually small images, they are just squished down in the page and are actually huge.

I many cases this is a mistake by the programmer who just does not know how to write the code to make a smalller image. So they use the uploaded image and just define the size in the page to be about 1 inch or so.

Unfortunately, the images could be 500 kilobytes or more and with 10 on a page the page is a 5MB download. For those on dial up connections, about 10 to 15 minutes. Less than 1 minute on most broadband connections.

I guess the designers just don't get that people wont wait 10 minutes for each page to load and that not everyone has super fast internet connections like they do.

This is a very common mistake by newbie webmasters that have no idea about page download times or the impact of heavy wbpages on the downloaded computers operating system.

Since the viewers computer has to resize the image with 500kb of data, it can crash the memory or even cause the browser to shut down.

Sure, the webmaster has a gigglebyte of ram and the latest super processor. But for those of us on budgets that force us to use computers under $3,000.00 we are faced with the impact of your incompetent design.

Think of it this way. You can pick up a car, can you?

If you put the car in a compactor and squash it down to a on foot square cube, nice handling size, can you pick it up?

NO! because the cube still weighs as much as the hole car before squashing. That small cube weighs over 2000 pounds, despite its small appearance.

If you want a small version of the car, you need to make a model of the car. A facsimily of the original, but smaller.

That is what you need to do with pictures. Stop using full size images as thumbnails. Think of the car and maybe you will get it.

Probably not, because no mater how much I tell people, I see the same mistake over and over even on big sites like autotrader.com.