Website backgrounds?

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Hey!
You know when websites have images for backgrounds?
How do they get them to load quickly?
Any ideas?

Browsers cache images like that, so you may be seeing a quick load because the browser already has a copy of the image. Otherwise: Make the bitmap image small. Optimize it as much as possible. (Paint Shop Pro used to have a good image optimizer.) Use an older format like GIF with fewer colors and a smaller file size. Search Google for advice from graphics designers.

My guess for websites:

http://en.fotolia.com/

http://www.sxc.hu/

http://morguefile.com/

http://nik.bot.nu/browse.html

For them to load quickly, use Photoshop and the option "Save for web..." when exporting them. You can then tweak the settings to arrive at a smaller image size (which will make them load faster) without having to resize.

See here: http://graphicdesign.about.com/od/howto ... eb_all.htm

Under Gimp, since you seem to be using Linux, look here:

http://registry.gimp.org/node/33

What we often do is to simply tile or repeat an image.

Take this one for instance: http://morguefile.com/

If you view source there and open the CSS file they link to, you'll find a reference to this image file:



Called "bgpattrn.gif".

Notice that's the huge background of the webpage. But of course, it's not a huge file, it's just tiled. So the web browser repeats it to the side and down to fill in the entire space.