WHEN I open a photographer's blog and as it begins to load the scroll bar appears, then gradually reduces in size hinting to a very long website page filled with images within 10 seconds I want to close it.

 

Friend and web developer John Croucher says that he aims to build pages that load within five seconds.

 

It's a common case of poor web awareness. Googling 'photographer blog' has just given me two random blogs which I opened only to be presented by a 24.274mb and 28.094mb download to view them. Go on, try it.

 

On a fast ADSL2+ connection it may of only taken me 1.4min and 1.6min to load these pages fully, but why must I wait? Research has found that website visitors will wait 4-8 seconds depending their connection for your page to load.

 

Your site won't load top to bottom, so while it loads the viewer may not even see anything but a shell and some text while all the images load, taking away from their already short patience while they look at moving on to the next page, your competitor.

 

"How can I improve my blog?" I hear you ask. There are several easy approaches to keep ahold of the situation.

 

Firstly limit the amount of posts that you display on one page, depending on how often you 'blog,' you may only want to display the latest 5-10 posts to engage your viewers with.

 

Then comes the biggest data crunch which is accountable for majority of the large pages, displaying a large selection of images with your post. We all want everyone to see our beautiful images we have captured, but most are not everyone is patient enough for them to load.

 

Optimise your images to be displayed in your blog by downsizing your images to fit within your website, So don't use a 1024px wide image where you only need it to be 500px. That will instantly make a difference.

 

Not only watch the size of your images in pixels but the dots per inch (dpi) as 72dpi is all your monitor will display, why cram in 300dpi of data only to be discarded?

 

Play with the quality, find the happy medium where you still maintain a nice clear crisp image but have a small file size. Typically around 70-100kb is ideal for a 800px wide photo.

 

Limit the amount of images you display with each post on your blog, for example you could display your top three shots to draw the viewer in, then when they continue to read more of that post by clicking on it they get the rest of the images.

 

Also think about implementing and using thumbnails, It's a great way to ensure a quick load with small images that viewers can click on to view a larger version.

 

I hope this gives you a better insight to blogs and how not to over crowd them with bandwidth hungry images to make everyones experience an enjoyable one.

 

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