A slider is a great way to capture visitors attention. It gives the site an up-beat professional feel if done properly.
However some people don’t optimize their images sizes. EG – Using a 500Kb image and having say 6 of these in a slider adds up to 3Meg. Pre-loading or loading on demand with these sizes is moot point. In addition most affiliates are on shared hosting, not like the casinos they’re promoting who use dedicated hosting coupled with a CDN (content delivery network) and other services to deliver a premium user experience.
Google apparently appreciates a fast loading site and it uses this load time in its ranking alog.
I saw a site today where the top header image was 609Kb. Even with my 20Mbit link that images was grinding to load – I can only pull content down as fast as the server it’s hosted on is capable of serving it. I managed to crunch the image down to a 82Kb png | 43Kb jpg and by using the part of the header gradient color I crunch it further to a 23Kb gif.
Not everything has to be *.png or even *.jpg, you can use a *.gif too. But it’s knowing what to use where, which seems to allude a lot of webmasters these days.
I still use Fireworks8 by the defunct Macromedia (bought out by Adobe), they were the original developer of Dreamweaver and Flash if you didn’t know. I know everyone raves about Photoshop but with Fireworks8 you don’t have to worry about layers etc etc it basically separates all those for you.
The point is Fireworks8 was made from the ground up to be used for image manipulation on the web. It has some kick ass tools to crunch images sizes down to a usable level.
Reiterating sliders are a great marketing tool if used effectively but if your images are not optimized and crunched down to a internet usable size your inadvertently increasing your site’s load time up to 10x longer that it needs to be.