This page is part of the WebCom Web Publishing Guide. It provides a brief set of tips about the best ways to make images available on your pages.

Images are likely to take up the bulk of the time it takes to "load" a page into a visitor's Web browser. To hasten the process of loading, the following guidelines are suggested. More detailed information about using images in your Web pages is available on this Images Page.

• Use smaller images. Many people access the Web at slow speeds.
• For the same reason, don't put too many images on one page. Each image requires a separate connection and download. In many cases, the user will have to wait for all the images to finish loading to be able to scroll down the page, which can take a while at slower speeds.
• If possible, use smaller images in place of larger ones, and set your page up so that when these smaller images are clicked, a larger version is loaded (see: Hotlinks in Images for more information on this). Use ".jpg" (JPEG compressed) format images for the larger versions.
• Use "interlaced" images (your graphic program should be able to create these, if not, there is a utility available at a site listed on this page: that will do it for you) so that Netscape and other compatible browsers can load and display them in "stages". If your image manipulation program doesn't support creation of interlaced images, see the Image Manipulation Page for links to services which can do this over the World Wide Web.