Rules for slices

I was wondering if anyone knew if there's a rule on how many slices you should or shouldn't have for your website. I know it varies from site to site, I guess my real question is, will too many slices create problems with your site? Like should you keep the amount of slices down to a minimum?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Yes, keep them to a minimum.

For every image on your page, the browser has to contact the server to request the image. This can cause a split second delay, and if it is multiplied by a 100, then it's really annoying to wait for a page to load. It would be better to just have a fewer number of larger files, than more images with smaller file sizes.

Just use your best judgement and try to hit somewhere in the middle.

Basically if you have a huge image saved as a GIF, you can slice it up by colors. Say if you have a big blue splotch over there, and a red one over there, then make a seperate GIF for each. Since GIFs can only have 256 colors, it makes for MUCH smaller file sizes if you limit the colors in each GIF.

In JPEGs the colors don't matter quite as much because they can store as many as they need to. But they also reduce the quality of the image and make it look kind of grainy and blurry.

In general, use GIFs for buttons, illustrations like my signature, and things with few colors and simple patterns.

Use JPEGs for photos, complex 3D renderings and photoshop work that has a lot of blurry stuff, or complex color patterns.

Hope that answered your question.

Hey thanks deker, yeah that's perfect. Just what I wanted to know.