Is the new front page too large?

[Momaw]

The new front page look nice, yes.  It's also around 796kbytes in size.  The large mounted knight graphic is, all by itself, 400kbytes. Who else thinks this page size is excessive?

 

[Grocat]

I WOULDN'T KNOW!!!! 

Though, in all seriousness, maybe.

-Grocat the Inequivocably Helpful Ambassador

 

[Volkier]

well, so far all the options state that either we find it too excessive, or don't care.. There is no option which allow us to select "we prefer the new web-site size" anywhere, hence I can't vote ::\

Mind, my internet connection is not so great either atm..

 

[The Pope]

I'd say the pictures could be compressed a bit more without having much impact on the site.

 

[Janus]

The biggest bloat is the knight, who can't be compressed further and still retain the nice alpha blended shadow (PNG-24 format). The only way to reduce the file size of it would be to make the dimensions smaller, or switch to a standard transparency format without the fancy alpha blend.

EDIT: or, the image could be chopped into pieces and the background made part of it, but that would be a bit of a nasty workaround.

 

[robertthered]

700kb for a single page, especially the main page, is seriously terrible. And no single image on a main page should ever be 400kb.

The whole site, excluding gallery images and other downloads, should be under 200kb. And there's plenty of room for cutting down. The navigation images, for example, are 17kb each, where they should and easily could be around 5kb or less.

On my computer it can take almost half a minute to load the main page. So although the current design looks nice, I must say I prefer the old design. It ran far smoother.

 

[Volkier]

I'm going to say that the single 400kb image on the page is heaps nicer than a LOT of other websites that have 10 x 40kb images (although usually its more like 20 images and 10 ads). I dunno I still prefer the new look - the page is not updated every-day anyway for people to be constantly browsing it, so it's sole purpose is to provide a good-looking image for the game - which it does do ::\

Takes about 20-30 secs for me as well - I just don't see how thats a problem.. at least for me..

 

[The Pope]

It would be good to have some low res gifs to load first and then swap into the real ones (if thats possible)

 

[Daegoth]

Unfortunately we can't reduce the size of the image because of the alpha of the image. The size reduction is made in other images which do not require alpha transparency.

The images will stay the same. Waiting for a descriptive page to load for 30 seconds is not a big deal anyway. It's not a part of the forum or something like that. It is static and it will be cached by your browser.

 

[Momaw]

If the web designers don't plan to do anything about the new page size, then they should at the very least change the order that the images load in.  Black text on top of the dark brown wood (which has a very high loading order), is difficult to read.  The "paper" background should load before the wood, so people can read the text.

 

[robertthered]

EDIT: Nevermind..

 

[argh]

I voted too slow, for obvious reasons

It may be true that it's static and cached, but newcomers might get pissed off. Anyway, It's your (the website maintainer) call, so I'll just add this comment and leaver it at that.

 

[Reinhart]

I personally don't care because I have a fast connection but I guess it would be an inconvience to people with slower connections, if you prefer, you could just link directly to the forums like I do... it saves time and there isn't any awesome images of knights to load, just images of silly people like who use a photograph of their face for their avatar.

 

[Zobolza]

The main page loads faster than 3 secounds for me so that don't matter at all. And as some has allready said, you don't load the main page everyday. And if a newcomer goes away becouse it takes 10 secounds to load the main page, why should he have time to download the demo?

 

[argh]

well, those two are two different things, because he's prepared to wait for the download to finish, but not for a "simple" webpage.

anyway, I don't know how many people would be annoyed enough to just leave, but if I had an average connection, I would think it pretty inconsiderate of the developers to make me wait THAT much. I do have a good connection (unversity), and I STILL think that it loads ridiculously slow. but yes, I can live with it.

 

[Stonewall382]

If it was a link from some other forum, something that someone had posted in passing, and it took thirty seconds for me, I'd just close it down.

 

[leprechaun]

Well, not everyone will have the same trouble. For me it loads in ten and I can see new things loading all the time so I know it's still going. Not everyone's stuck on 56K.

 

[Mathias]

People are complaining about this? Shush up and wait your extra 10 seconds or so. Like the mod said, it gets cached, so suck it up. Sorry to be harsh, but looks like your just looking for something to complain about honestly. This is a very small deal, the new site design looks great and I prefer it regardless of how many *seconds* it takes to load.

 

[Ilex]

Am I the only one who cleans his cache on regular basis?

 

[Janus]

OK, something else that some people apparently need to take into consideration.
Ask yourself, "what is the purpose of the website?" It's website for a computer game.
Now think of the computer game websites you've been to and how much stuff they usually have to load. Pretty big, right? I'm sure you wouldn't expect one of those sites to be under 200k.