How do I get a nice background image without incurring a huge page load time?

Example: mail.yahoo.com has a pretty nice background image beneath their main login form.

If I had an equally 开发者_Python百科nice picture...How do I set it as background without making the page load too slow?

How big of a file size do I have to be to start worrying about this?

Thanks!

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• Use a lot of compression in your jpeg settings when you create the image. (JPG will probably be the best format)
• Keep overall contrast low in the the image.
• Avoid complex textures (blur out if necessary), chose more gradient-like forms.

Shoot for something around or less than 100kB, if you can swing it. Even that might pop in with some delay, depending on other factors.

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To keep the image size to a minimum, you could use a program like Yahoo's Smush It (http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/).

It'll remove any unnecessary bytes in your image, without losing any quality making the image as small as possible.

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Check:

http://httparchive.org/interesting.php

Average image size is 450KB for a web page (total for all images). Just make sure you don't go over the average too much and you should be fine.