Dave, I can't do that wrote:
Well, neither of those example stores impress. Both are using
needlessly huge pics.

The first one here I compressed to 39K
http://i1010.photobucket.com/albums/...-fem_500px.jpg
This is the original 100K
http://i1010.photobucket.com/albums/...-fem_500px.jpg

Tell me you can see an appreciable visual difference, yet one will
load almost 4 times faster. I could easily get it down to 28K with a
tiny but acceptable amount of fuzzies on the fine text.

I have been programming websites for probably 15 years, can't recall
when I started, but it is not an afternoon's book reading to do it.

http://i1129.photobucket.com/albums/...-fem_Thumb.jpg

This is the kind of image that should load during page refreshes.
It's 4.7K or 5% the size of the original and less than 12% the size of
the compressed version.

It would speed up page refreshes by 8.3 x.
If a customer clicks on the thumbnail, *then* he can wait for the ~ 40 KB
download. Page refreshes would require 82 KB, not 680 KB as it would
be with 40 KB images and certainly not 1.6 MB as it is now.

--Winston