Slicing Cuts Down Size?

Hey all,

Just made a very cool logo for mysite but the bad part is, it is 35.9KB. This is sort of too big and will take too long to load on dialup. I was wondering, If I sliced the image up in two, will it maybe speed up the load time? Or will the slices still both be 35.9KB?

Thanks.

It will be slower most likely, because it won't really reduce the file size, and the user's computer will have to contact the server twice to download the file instead of once.

Oh ok... bad idea huh? Any tips on making the file size smaller without reducing quality?

36k isn't that bad...

Are you using Save For Web? I usually save Jpegs about 50% - 60%...

If you save it as a GIF, sometimes cutting it up into pieces will help because a GIF can only use 256 colors. So if you have large patches of solid colors, you could make one GIF primarily one color, then use others for the other large patches of color. That would help some.

ACtually deker, Many people do slice for example their logos up so that they will load piece by piece on slower computers.

Soemtimes cuting up gifs will help.

They don't load any faster, they just might seem like it if you see a piece of the logo faster than you'd see the whole logo. It would actually increase loadtime for the reasons I stated above though. It depends on the site though. I mean you obviously don't want one huge graphic on your site. I'm not saying that. But there is no value in say, cutting your logo in half down the middle, just for the same of cutting it down the middle.

I was thinking along the same lines as deker when I was debating whether or not to slice up large images on my site (a long time ago).

Some servers restrict simultaneous connections to 2, so instead of having it load one large graphic, it loads the smaller slices of it 2 at a time, giving you the illusion of a shortened loading time. But in the end, the loading time should be the same or too small of a difference to notice.

I was reading an article at webmonkey about that:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/26/index0a.html

The article is really long, and about site optimization/compression in general, but Lesson one (linked to) is about images. Also, if you're ready for a laugh, read the One Site, One Day, One Buck article at

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/32/index3a.html?tw=design

Webmonkey, while sometimes a little outdated, is a great resource.

tom

*edit* Perhaps also check out

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/28/index1a_page6.html?tw=design