A question about sm pics instead of background

[cupysmom]

I have notices several sites that use small portions of pictures put together instead of one big picture as a background. Here are 2 examples http://andmed.com and http://www.scottrade.com/index.asp?supbid=4172 . Is there a reason for this? Do they load faster?
Sarah

http://sarahsslings.com

[Tommy]

Hi Sarah,

In the case of http://andmed.com, they did it so they can add links to various parts of the image. If you cut them up into smaller pieces, you can assign html to each part and link them to various web pages. It's a good way of adding navigation to a montage.

Sometimes this technique is used to speed up downloading. You can cut up different parts of the images and compress and save the segments into smaller/optimized files.

There are other ways to add navigation to images, instead of slicing the images up they could have added an image map. This assigns co-ordinates to the image and you can then specify link urls for each quadrant/section.

[akashik]

It's a good technique for both the reasons mentioned above. Saving some areas of the larger picture as a gif file, or a jpg file will reduce the over all size of the page:

- gif - larger solid colors without much detail
- jpg - detailed pictures (faces people etc).

Also having a bunch of pictures instead of one big one tends to give an illusion of a page loading faster, even if it's not. People *see* things downloading all over the place so they tend to stick around longer than watching one giant chunk slowly crawling down their screen.

Lastly if the webdesigner is thinking ahead a bit they can slice an image in a way that allows parts of that image to be used again later in the site. :D As it's already downloaded once, chances are it'll show up right away on the other page, speeding that one up too.

Greg Moore

[cupysmom]

That makes sense... Thank you for explaining it to me!

[akashik]

:)

As you keep building sites you eventually pick up (or even think up) a few ideas for your bag of tricks. It's one of the fun things working in a medium with restrictions (browsers, download speeds, color ranges). You're challenged to work your way around these things all the time to squeeze that extra bit out of a site.

Of course sometimes to realize you're sitting there screaming nonsense at your monitor and realize the guys in the white suits are calling your name and waving a butterfly net at you :D

All in good fun

Greg Moore

[cupysmom]

lol!

[Rakesh1]

:)

As you keep building sites you eventually pick up (or even think up) a few ideas for your bag of tricks. It's one of the fun things working in a medium with restrictions (browsers, download speeds, color ranges). You're challenged to work your way around these things all the time to squeeze that extra bit out of a site.

Of course sometimes to realize you're sitting there screaming nonsense at your monitor and realize the guys in the white suits are calling your name and waving a butterfly net at you :D

All in good fun

Greg Moore

i agree with u Greg, thats a big fact which we ignore sometimes