Why is the background taking so long to load?

[Beverly-Texas]

Hello,

I have a 45KB gif file set as the background for my website
(www.countryappledesigns.com) but when I go to the site, the background takes
forever to load. Is this happening when you visit the site too? Are
backgrounds supposed to take this long to load? Should I put the images in
cells as opposed to in the background to make it load faster? Also, I tried
loading a .jpg image to the background but FP didn't seem to like it - it
wouldn't ever show up in the preview so I had to assume that it didn't allow
..jpg as background images?

Thanks,
Beverly

 

[Rob Giordano \(Crash Gordon®\)]

The images that you are swapping/transitioning are huge, optimize them. Yes..thats a long time even on broadband.

Why doubles? One swapping image centered would be more than enough...imo.

 

[Murray]

A 45K image will take approximately 10 seconds to load on a 56k dialup. So
your problem (although a 45K background image is your entire page weight
budget if you want to hit the generally accepted target of 10 seconds to
download on a 56k dialup) is not that image, it's the others -

Global Statistics
Total HTTP Requests: 6
Total Size: 274278 bytes

Object Size Totals
Object type Size (bytes)
HTML: 7522
HTML Images: 266756
CSS Images: 0
Total Images: 266756
Javascript: 0
CSS: 0
Multimedia: 0
Other: 0

External Objects
External Object QTY
Total HTML: 1
Total HTML Images: 5
Total CSS Images: 0
Total Images: 5
Total Scripts: 0
Total CSS imports: 0
Total Frames: 0
Total Iframes: 0


All 220K of them!

 

[E. T. Culling]

Yes, the page did take a long time. I (and many others) would be driven away
immediately by all the blinking images. Why don't you put those designs on
separate pages. Your background image may only be 45kb ... but check out the
sizes of the others... 268, 114, 116, 165 etc. ... just not the right
approach!
Eleanor