I am completely new to web design. I am working on a site for my wife’s new business. It needs a few tweaks, but the main issue is how long the header takes to load. I have used a background image with CSS, but for it to look right the file size is large so slows down the page load time. You can see it at www.fenlandtextilestudio.co.uk
Think I have sorted this now - saved a lower resolution version with Gimp and cut the file size considerably.
or even Photoshop Elements which is very much cheaper than the full blown Photoshop and has all the bells and whistles most people would likely ever need to use.
I haven’t got Photoshop (my budget won’t stretch to that at the moment), but I have just realized you can do the same in Gimp
There are a few things not right with your image. When I try to open in, no matter in what program, It gives a unknown or invalid marker error. Besides of that the image is amost 1.5mb.
Indeed you can. Saving it as an 80% quality JPG brings it down from 1.5MB to about 45KB, and is still perfectly good enough to use as a banner background.
Have you optimised the image for web publication in something like Photoshop?
Quite often I can use at least 50% jpg compression to reduce the image size (in kb) by a large amount without any significant loss of image quality.
I can recommend http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/
Check “show all results” and there are a variety of sizes.
It’s as good as if not better than Elements.
Paul