It was pointed out to me that perhaps I didn't want a 3.5mb background on all my pages. Which of course makes sense once I thought about it. So I cropped the photo down to 1280 x 964 and reinserted it - 1.16 mb.

I also changed the banner at the top of my page to include a logo (thank you photoshop) the size (1280 x 155) stayed the same, but the file size increased from 198kb to 235kb.

When I save and upload, I get a warning that I have added a large file and this will slow the loading of my page. As far as I can tell, I have significantly reduced the size of the overall page. By more than half!

Why am I getting this message now? Do I need to worry about it?

I changed the background and logo on a few pages and uploaded to I could ask the pros before I go any farther.



www.williamallendesigns.com - this shows the new background and new logo
http://www.williamallendesigns.com/ArtworkFront.html - shows the old logo and background
http://www.williamallendesigns.com/ArmoredTable.html - This is a page where I do not use the logo and I do not get a large file pop-up.

Even an image of 400 kb or so would generate that warning for me. In my opinion a background over 1MB is a LOT of bandwidth...are you sure just the one image is that large?

I just looked at it. With that kind of background maybe you'd be better off with a smallish tile that repeats rather than one huge file?

I suppose I could try that. And yes, I checked the file sizes, they are as I posted. Don't understand why I never got that warning before.......

I got that warning once and it asked if I wanted to continue to see this warnig I ope's no! so now I don't see it, maybe you hit that by accident.
Spinny has the right idea for sure. My background of bricks is 100x100 and it auto tiles it. Go VSD!

William, have you tried decreasing the color depth? I played around with the background and reduced it to 4 bits. Since it is a stone-like background, it still has enough definition to work, and took the size from 3600K to 609K...saved as a png...seems to retain more detail. You can take the header down to 8 bit depth and not even notice a difference in definition, but reduce size drastically.

Another thought. People with smaller screens (still a lot of us) have to scroll quite a ways over. Might consider keeping your site around 900 to 1000px. wide...that, too, would reduce page weight.

If you cannot reduce the color depth in the images, feel free to contact me through my site (in sig line) and I can send smaller images your way.

Melanie